A sportsman told me that he had, the day before--that was in the middle
of October--seen a green chestnut burr dropped on our great river meadow,
fifty rods from the nearest wood, and much farther from the nearest
chestnut tree, and he could not tell how it came there. Occasionally, when
chestnutting in midwinter, I find thirty or forty nuts in a pile, left in
its gallery just under the leaves, by the common wood mouse.

7. But especially, in the winter, the extent to which this transportation
and planting of nuts is carried on, is made apparent by the snow. In
almost every wood you will see where the red or gray squirrels have pawed
down through the snow in a hundred places, sometimes two feet deep, and
almost always directly to a nut or a pine cone, as directly as if they had
started from it and bored upward,--which you and I could not have done. It
would be difficult for us to find one before the snow falls. Commonly, no
doubt, they had deposited them there in the fall. You wonder if they
remember the localities or discover them by the scent.

8. The red squirrel commonly has its winter abode in the earth under a
thicket of evergreens, frequently under a small clump of evergreens in the
midst of a deciduous wood. If there are any nut trees, which still retain
their nuts, standing at a distance without the wood, their paths often
lead directly to and from them. We, therefore, need not suppose an oak
standing here and there in the wood in order to seed it, but if a few
stand within twenty or thirty rods of it, it is sufficient.

9. I think that I may venture to say that every white-pine cone that falls
to the earth naturally in this town, before opening and losing its seeds,
and almost every pitch-pine one that falls at all, is cut off by a
squirrel; and they begin to pluck them long before they are ripe, so that
when the crop of white-pine cones is a small one, as it commonly is, they
cut off thus almost everyone of these before it fairly ripens.

10. I think, moreover, that their design, if I may so speak, in cutting
them off green, is partly to prevent their opening and losing their seeds,
for these are the ones for which they dig through the snow, and the only
white-pine cones which contain anything then. I have counted in one heap
the cores of two hundred and thirty-nine pitch-pine cones which had been
cut off and stripped by the red squirrel the previous winter.

11. The nuts thus left on the surface, or burie