In the Catskills | Page 9

rear rather than his front. "Come if you dare," he says, and
his attitude makes even the farm-dog pause. After a few encounters of
this kind, and if you entertain the usual hostility towards him, your
mode of attack will speedily resolve itself into moving about him in a
circle, the radius of which will be the exact distance at which you can
hurl a stone with accuracy and effect.
He has a secret to keep and knows it, and is careful not to betray
himself until he can do so with the most telling effect. I have known
him to preserve his serenity even when caught in a steel trap, and look
the very picture of injured innocence, manoeuvring carefully and
deliberately to extricate his foot from the grasp of the naughty jaws. Do
not by any means take pity on him, and lend a helping hand!
How pretty his face and head! How fine and delicate his teeth, like a
weasel's or a cat's! When about a third grown, he looks so well that one
covets him for a pet. He is quite precocious, however and capable, even
at this tender age, of making a very strong appeal to your sense of
smell.
No animal is more cleanly in his habits than he. He is not an awkward

boy who cuts his own face with his whip; and neither his flesh nor his
fur hints the weapon with which he is armed. The most silent creature
known to me, he makes no sound, so far as I have observed, save a
diffuse, impatient noise, like that produced by beating your hand with a
whisk-broom, when the farm-dog has discovered his retreat in the stone
fence. He renders himself obnoxious to the farmer by his partiality for
hens' eggs and young poultry. He is a confirmed epicure, and at
plundering hen-roosts an expert. Not the full-grown fowls are his
victims, but the youngest and most tender. At night Mother Hen
receives under her maternal wings a dozen newly hatched chickens, and
with much pride and satisfaction feels them all safely tucked away in
her feathers. In the morning she is walking about disconsolately,
attended by only two or three of all that pretty brood. What has
happened? Where are they gone? That pickpocket, Sir Mephitis, could
solve the mystery. Quietly has he approached, under cover of darkness,
and one by one relieved her of her precious charge. Look closely and
you will see their little yellow legs and beaks, or part of a mangled
form, lying about on the ground. Or, before the hen has hatched, he
may find her out, and, by the same sleight of hand, remove every egg,
leaving only the empty blood-stained shells to witness against him. The
birds, especially the ground-builders, suffer in like manner from his
plundering propensities.
The secretion upon which he relies for defense, and which is the chief
source of his unpopularity, while it affords good reasons against
cultivating him as a pet, and mars his attractiveness as game, is by no
means the greatest indignity that can be offered to a nose. It is a rank,
living smell, and has none of the sickening qualities of disease or
putrefaction. Indeed, I think a good smeller will enjoy its most refined
intensity. It approaches the sublime, and makes the nose tingle. It is
tonic and bracing, and, I can readily believe, has rare medicinal
qualities. I do not recommend its use as eyewater, though an old farmer
assures me it has undoubted virtues when thus applied. Hearing, one
night, a disturbance among his hens, he rushed suddenly out to catch
the thief, when Sir Mephitis, taken by surprise, and no doubt much
annoyed at being interrupted, discharged the vials of his wrath full in
the farmer's face, and with such admirable effect that, for a few

moments, he was completely blinded, and powerless to revenge himself
upon the rogue, who embraced the opportunity to make good his escape;
but he declared that afterwards his eyes felt as if purged by fire, and his
sight was much clearer.
In March that brief summary of a bear, the raccoon, comes out of his
den in the ledges, and leaves his sharp digitigrade track upon the
snow,--traveling not unfrequently in pairs,--a lean, hungry couple, bent
on pillage and plunder. They have an unenviable time of it,--feasting in
the summer and fall, hibernating in winter, and starving in spring. In
April I have found the young of the previous year creeping about the
fields, so reduced by starvation as to be quite helpless, and offering no
resistance to my taking them up by the tail and carrying them home.
The old ones also become very much emaciated, and come boldly up to
the barn or other