ir
home range, and often they become gaunt and lank, driven to take
desperate chances to save themselves from starvation and death.

As you can easily imagine, it keeps Bunny Cottontail moving to outwit
his many enemies. He has no briar patches in that rugged country,
though the jumper thickets might serve as such, so he lives beneath the
rocks, usually planning a front and back door to his burrow. In this
way he has a private exit when weasels or bobcats make their uninvited
visitations. A whole Rooseveltian family of bunnies live in congested
districts. Learning this, I usually set a number of snares in their
runways, or at likely holes beneath the rocks.

Part of the game of making nature yield one a living is keeping an eye
out at all times for possible food supplies. If a rabbit scurried
across my path, I marked the spot of his refuge. If he dodged beneath
a certain slab, I set my snare there. Then I poked about, hoping to
scare him into the snare. I did not always succeed in this, though,
for my stick could not turn the corners of his burrow, and he often
appeared out of some other exit, laughing at my stupidity, no doubt.
Sometimes, when very hungry, I tried smoking him out. The stone porch
of his burrow usually sloped, so a small smudge started at its lower
side would travel up-hill, into the tunnel. Mr. Rabbit, thinking the
woods were on fire, would make a dash for the open and fall victim to
the snare. But despite the fact that rabbits are credited with little
wit, I have often known them to nose aside my traps and escape.

Cottontails I found up to eight or nine thousand feet, but even higher
I ran across their cousins, the snowshoe. He quite excelled me in
manipulating his "webs"--his tremendous hind feet with long, clawlike
toes, covered with stiff and, I judged, waterproof hairs. He made his
way nimbly over the soft, deep snow, while I on my webs often
floundered and fell. Like the ptarmigan and the weasel, the snowshoe
rabbit changed to a white coat for winter. In the spring, he was
bluish, though underneath he still retained his arctic snowiness. In
the fall, with good taste and a sense of the fitness of things, he put
on a tan coat, and then, as the winter snows began to drift, he once
more donned his ermine robes.

Grouse were plentiful, except during the winter months. Usually I
found them between six thousand and nine thousand feet altitude, but as
the fall coloring painted the m