Part 13 (2/2)

[19] One of my friends in the faculty of the University of Chicago tells me there are still a good many armadillos in Texas.

MR. ARMADILLO'S REMARKABLE NOSE DRILL

For all he looks so knightly, so far as his armor is concerned, the armadillo is timid, peaceful, and never looking for trouble with anybody, but once aroused fights fiercely and does much damage with his long hooked claws. His chief diet is ants. These he finds with his nose.

He locates them by scent and then bores in after them. You'd think he'd twist it off, that long nose of his; he turns it first one way and then the other, like a gimlet. And so fast!

The armadillo dislikes snakes as much as all true knights disliked dragons. That is, he doesn't like them socially; although he's quite fond of them as a variation in diet. He'll leap on a snake, paying not the slightest attention to his attempts to bite through that coat of mail, and tear him into bits and eat him.

Another armored knight that eats snakes and that other animals seldom eat--much as they'd like to--is the hedgehog. If you were a fox, instead of a boy or girl, I wouldn't have to tell you about how hard it is to serve hedgehog at the family table. One of the earliest things a little fox learns in countries where there are hedgehogs is to let the hedgehog alone.

”Hedgehogs would be very nice--to eat, I mean--if they weren't so ugly about not wanting to be eaten.”

We can imagine Mamma Fox saying that to the children. Then she goes on:

”The whole ten inches of a hedgehog--he's about that long--are covered with short, stiff, sharp, gray spines. He's easy to catch--just ambles along, hardly lifting his short legs from the ground. And he goes about at night--just when we foxes are out marketing. That would be so handy, don't you see; but the trouble is about those nasty spines of his. Try to catch him and he rolls up into a ball with all his spines--they're sharp as needles--sticking out everywhere, and every which way.

And--well, you simply can't get at him, that's all. So just don't have anything to do with him. It's only a waste of time.”

Hedgehogs live in hedges and thickets and in narrow gulches covered with bushes. They do their share of ploughing when nosing about with their pig-like snouts for slugs, snails, and insects, and when they dig places for their home nests. These homes they line with moss, gra.s.s, and leaves, and in them spend the long Winter, indifferent to the tempests and the cold.

But there's another place to look for hedgehogs, and you never would guess! In people's kitchens. If you ever go to England you'll find them in many country homes, helping with the work. They're great on c.o.c.kroaches, and they're perfectly safe from the cat and the dog. Both Puss and Towser know all about those spines, just as well as Mrs. Fox does.

When they've eaten all the c.o.c.kroaches, give them some cooked vegetables, porridge, or bread and milk, and they'll be perfectly content. They're easy to tame and get very friendly.

In the wild state, besides the insects and things I mentioned, they eat snakes; and poison snakes, too! The poison never seems to bother them at all. Their table manners are interesting, also, when it comes to eating snakes. They always begin at the tail.[20] They'd no more think of eating a snake any other way than one would of picking up the wrong fork at a formal dinner.

[20] Isn't that the way a toad swallows an angleworm? Or how _does_ he do it?

UNDER THE HEDGEHOG'S WATER-PROOF ROOF

That's one of the things about good manners Mamma Hedgehog teaches the babies, I suppose. Of these she has from two to four, and she makes a curious nest especially for them; a nest with a roof on it that sheds rain like any other roof. Just as it is with puppies and kittens, the babies are born blind; and not only that, but they can't hear at first, either. While they are young their spines--I don't mean their back-bones, but their other spines--are soft, but they become hard as the babies grow and open their eyes and ears on the world. The muscles on their backs get very thick and strong, so that when they don't want to have anything to do with anybody--say a fox, or a dog, or a weasel--they just pull the proper muscle strings and tie themselves up into a kind of bag made of their own needle-cus.h.i.+on skins, with the needles all sticking out, point up!

III. A VISIT TO SOME FARM VILLAGES

TWELVE LITTLE MARMOTS ALL IN ONE BED

Next I'd like you to visit with me certain other farmers who remind us of the Middle Ages also; not because they wear armor, like the armadillos and the hedgehogs and the lords of castles, but because they live in farm villages as the farmer peasants used to do around the castles of the lords. Moreover, one reason they live together in this way is for protection--just as it was with the peasants--only among these little democrats there's no overlord business; each one's home is his castle. Another reason for this village arrangement is that it's such a sociable way to live; and they're great society people, these farm villagers. The marmots, for example, the largest and heaviest of the squirrel family, just love company. In their mountain country--they're mountain people, the marmots--they play together, work together, and during the long, cold night of Winter snuggle together in their burrows. Their burrows are close by each other among the rocks.

They have both Summer and Winter residences. In Summer they go away up in the mountains, hollow out their burrows and raise their babies. When the snows of late Autumn send them down the mountainsides, twelve or fifteen of them, all working together, pitch in and make a tunnel in the soil among the rocks, enlarging it at the end into a big room. Next they put in a good pile of dry hay, carefully close the front door and lock it up with stones caulked with gra.s.s and moss. Then they all cuddle down together, as snug as you please, and stay there until Spring.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HIGHWAYS OF GROUND-SQUIRREL TOWN

Almost as crooked as the streets of London town, aren't they? And as hard to find one's way about in--unless, of course, one were a ground-squirrel. This is the burrow of a Richardson ground-squirrel sketched by Thompson Seton, near Whitewater, Manitoba.]

Another member of the marmot family who is very fond of good company is the prairie-dog. There may be thousands in a prairie-dog town. Each little prairie-dog home has in front of it a mound something like an Eskimo's hut. The prairie-dogs make these mounds in digging out their burrows. They pile the dirt right at the front door. This may not look neat to us, but you'll see it's just the thing--this dirt pile--when you know what the prairie-dog does with it. He uses it as a watch-tower.

When, from this watch-tower, he spies certain people he doesn't want to meet, you ought to see how quickly he can make for his front door and into the house! The times are still lawless where the prairie-dog lives, and he has to be on the lookout all the while for coyotes, for foxes, for badgers, for the black-footed ferret and the old gray wolf; to say nothing of hawks and brown owls.

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