Secret of the Woods | Page 9

had
been caught potting quail, I threw away the hateful shell that had
almost slain my friend. and went back to camp.
There I made a mouse of a bit of muskrat fur, with a piece of my
leather shoestring sewed on for a tail. It served the purpose perfectly,
for within the hour I was gloating over the size and beauty of the big
trout as he stretched his length on the rock beside me. But I lost the
fraud at the next cast, leaving it, with a foot of my leader, in the mouth
of a second trout that rolled up at it the instant it touched his eddy
behind the rock.
After that the wood mice were safe so far as I was concerned. Not a
trout, though he were big as a salmon, would ever taste them, unless
they chose to go swimming of their own accord; and I kept their table
better supplied than before. I saw much of their visiting back and forth,
and have understood better what those tunnels mean that one finds in
the spring when the last snows are melting. In a corner of the woods,
where the drifts lay, you will often find a score of tunnels coming in
from all directions to a central chamber. They speak of Tookhees'
sociable nature, of his long visits with his fellows, undisturbed by
swoop or snap, when the packed snow above has swept the summer
fear away and made him safe from hawk and owl and fox and wildcat,
and when no open water tempts him to go swimming where Skooktum
the big trout lies waiting, mouse hungry, under his eddy.
The weeks passed all too quickly, as wilderness weeks do, and the sad
task of breaking camp lay just before us. But one thing troubled
me--the little Tookhees, who knew no fear, but tried to make a nest in
the sleeve of my flannel shirt. His simple confidence touched me more
than the curious ways of all the other mice. Every day he came and
took his crumbs, not from the common table, but from my, hand,
evidently enjoying its warmth while he ate, and always getting the
choicest morsels. But I knew that he would be the first one caught by
the owl after I left; for it is fear only that saves the wild things.

Occasionally one finds animals of various kinds in which the instinct of
fear is lacking--a frog, a young partridge, a moose calf--and wonders
what golden age that knew no fear, or what glorious vision of Isaiah in
which lion and lamb lie down together, is here set forth. I have even
seen a young black duck, whose natural disposition is wild as the
wilderness itself, that had profited nothing by his mother's alarms and
her constant lessons in hiding, but came bobbing up to my canoe
among the sedges of a wilderness lake, while his brethren crouched
invisible in their coverts of bending rushes, and his mother flapped
wildly off, splashing and quacking and trailing a wing to draw me away
from the little ones.
Such an one is generally abandoned by its mother, or else is the first to
fall in the battle with the strong before she gives him up as hopeless.
Little Tookhees evidently belonged to this class, so before leaving I
undertook the task of teaching him fear, which had evidently been too
much for Nature and his own mother. I pinched him a few times,
hooting like an owl as I did so,--a startling process, which sent the
other mice diving like brown streaks to cover. Then I waved a branch
over him, like a hawk's wing, at the same time flipping him end over
end, shaking him up terribly. Then again, when he appeared with a new
light dawning in his eyes, the light of fear, I would set a stick to
wiggling like a creeping fox among the ferns and switch him sharply
with a hemlock tip. It was a hard lesson, but he learned it after a few
days. And before I finished the teaching, not a mouse would come to
my table, no matter how persuasively I squeaked. They would dart
about in the twilight as of yore, but the first whish of my stick sent
them all back to cover on the instant.
That was their stern yet, practical preparation for the robber horde that
would soon be prowling over my camping ground. Then a stealthy
movement among the ferns or the sweep of a shadow among the
twilight shadows would mean a very different thing from wriggling
stick and waving hemlock tip. Snap and swoop, and teeth and
claws,--jump for your life and find out afterwards. That is the rule for a
wise wood