The Writings of John Burroughs Part 9

With the song-birds, love-making begins as soon as the hens are here. So far as I have observed, the robin and the bluebird win their mates by gentle and fond approaches; but certain of the sparrows, notably the little social sparrow or "chippie," appear to carry the case by storm. The same proceeding may be observed among the English sparrows, now fairly established on our soil. Two or three males beset a female, and a regular scuffle ensues. The poor bird is pulled and jostled and cajoled amid what appears to be the greatest mirth and hilarity of her audacious suitors. Her plumage is plucked and ruffled; the rivals roll over each other and over her; she extricates herself as best she can, and seems to say or scream "no," "no," to every one of them with great emphasis. What finally determines her choice would be hard to say. Our own sparrows are far less noisy and obstreperous, but the same little comedy in a milder form is often enacted among them. When two males have a tilt, they rise several feet in the air, beak to beak, and seek to deal each other blows as they mount. I have seen two male chewinks facing each other and wrathfully impelled upward in the same manner, while the female that was the bone of contention between them regarded them unconcernedly from the near bushes.

The bobolink is also a precipitate and impetuous wooer. It is a trial of speed, as if the female were to say, "Catch me and I am yours," and she scurries away with all her might and main, often with three or four dusky knights in hot pursuit. When she takes to cover in the gra.s.s, there is generally a squabble "down among the tickle-tops," or under the b.u.t.tercups, and "Winterseeble" or "Conquedle" is the winner.

In marked contrast to this violent love-making are the social and festive reunions of the goldfinches about mating time. All the birds of a neighborhood gather in a treetop, and the trial apparently becomes one of voice and song. The contest is a most friendly and happy one; all is harmony and gayety. The females chirrup and twitter, and utter their confiding "PAISLEY"

"PAISLEY," while the more gayly dressed males squeak and warble in the most delightful strain. The matches are apparently all made and published during these gatherings; everybody is in a happy frame of mind; there is no jealousy, and no rivalry but to see who shall be gayest.

It often happens among the birds that the male has a rival after the nuptials have been celebrated and the work of housekeeping fairly begun. Every season a pair of phbe-birds have built their nest on an elbow in the spouting beneath the eaves of my house.

The past spring a belated male made desperate efforts to supplant the lawful mate and gain possession of the unfinished nest. There was a battle fought about the premises every hour in the day for at least a week. The antagonists would frequently grapple and fall to the ground, and keep their hold like two dogs. On one such occasion I came near covering them with my hat. I believe the intruder was finally worsted and withdrew from the place. One noticeable feature of the affair was the apparent utter indifference of the female, who went on with her nest-building as if all was peace and harmony. There can be little doubt that she would have applauded and accepted the other bird had he finally been the victor.

One of the most graceful of warriors is the robin. I know few prettier sights than two males challenging and curveting about each other upon the gra.s.s in early spring. Their attentions to each other are so courteous and restrained. In alternate curves and graceful sallies, they pursue and circ.u.mvent each other. First one hops a few feet, then the other, each one standing erect in true military style while his fellow pa.s.ses him and describes the segment of an ellipse about him, both uttering the while a fine complacent warble in a high but suppressed key. Are they lovers or enemies? the beholder wonders, until they make a spring and are beak to beak in the twinkling of an eye, and perhaps mount a few feet into the air, but rarely actually delivering blows upon each other. Every thrust is parried, every movement met. They follow each other with dignified composure about the fields or lawn, into trees and upon the ground, with plumage slightly spread, b.r.e.a.s.t.s glowing, their lisping, shrill war-song just audible. It forms on the whole the most civil and high-bred tilt to be witnessed during the season.

When the c.o.c.k-robin makes love he is the same considerate, deferential, but insinuating gallant. The warble he makes use of on that occasion is the same, so far as my ear can tell, as the one he pipes when facing his rival.

FOX AND HOUND

I stood on a high hill or ridge one autumn day and saw a hound run a fox through the fields far beneath me. What odors that fox must have shaken out of himself, I thought, to be traced thus easily, and how great their specific gravity not to have been blown away like smoke by the breeze! The fox ran a long distance down the hill, keeping within a few feet of a stone wall; then turned a right angle and led off for the mountain, across a plowed field and a succession of pasture lands. In about fifteen minutes the hound came in full blast with her nose in the air, and never once did she put it to the ground while in my sight. When she came to the stone wall, she took the other side from that taken by the fox, and kept about the same distance from it, being thus separated several yards from his track, with the fence between her and it. At the point where the fox turned sharply to the left, the hound overshot a few yards, then wheeled, and, feeling the air a moment with her nose, took up the scent again and was off on his trail as unerringly as Fate. It seemed as if the fox must have sowed himself broadcast as he went along, and that his scent was so rank and heavy that it settled in the hollows and clung tenaciously to the bushes and crevices in the fence. I thought I ought to have caught a remnant of it as I pa.s.sed that way some minutes later, but I did not. But I suppose it was not that the light-footed fox so impressed himself upon the ground he ran over, but that the sense of the hound was so keen. To her sensitive nose these tracks steamed like hot cakes, and they would not have cooled off so as to be undistinguishable for several hours. For the time being, she had but one sense: her whole soul was concentrated in her nose.

It is amusing, when the hunter starts out of a winter morning, to see his hound probe the old tracks to determine how recent they are. He sinks his nose down deep in the snow so as to exclude the air from above, then draws a long full breath, giving sometimes an audible snort. If there remains the least effluvium of the fox, the hound will detect it. If it be very slight, it only sets his tail wagging; if it be strong, it unloosens his tongue.

Such things remind one of the waste, the friction, that is going on all about us, even when the wheels of life run the most smoothly.

A fox cannot trip along the top of 'a stone wall so lightly but that he will leave enough of himself to betray his course to the hound for hours afterward. When the boys play "hare and hounds,"

the hare scatters bits of paper to give a clew to the pursuers, but he scatters himself much more freely if only our sight and scent were sharp enough to detect the fragments. Even the fish leave a trail in the water, and it is said the otter will pursue them by it. The birds make a track in the air, only their enemies hunt by sight rather than by scent. The fox baffles the hound most upon a hard crust of frozen snow; the scent will not hold to the smooth, bead-like granules.

Judged by the eye alone, the fox is the lightest and most buoyant creature that runs. His soft wrapping of fur conceals the muscular play and effort that is so obvious in the hound that pursues him, and he comes bounding along precisely as if blown by a gentle wind.

His ma.s.sive tail is carried as if it floated upon the air by its own lightness.

The hound is not remarkable for his fleetness, but how he will hang!--often running late into the night, and sometimes till morning, from ridge to ridge, from peak to peak; now on the mountain, now crossing the valley, now playing about a large slope of uplying pasture fields. At times the fox has a pretty well- defined orbit, and the hunter knows where to intercept him. Again, he leads off like a comet, quite beyond the system of hills and ridges upon which he was started, and his return is entirely a matter of conjecture; but if the day be not more than half spent, the chances are that the fox will be back before night, though the sportsman's patience seldom holds out that long.

The hound is a most interesting dog. How solemn and long-visaged he is,--how peaceful and well-disposed! He is the Quaker among dogs. All the viciousness and currishness seem to have been weeded out of him; he seldom quarrels, or fights, or plays, like other dogs. Two strange hounds, meeting for the first time, behave as civilly toward each other as two men. I know a hound that has an ancient, wrinkled, human, far-away look that reminds one of the bust of Homer among the Elgin marbles. He looks like the mountains toward which his heart yearns so much.

The hound is a great puzzle to the farm dog; the latter, attracted by his baying, comes barking and snarling up through the fields, bent on picking a quarrel; he intercepts the hound, snubs and insults and annoys him in every way possible, but the hound heeds him not: if the dog attacks him, he gets away as best he can, and goes on with the trail; the cur bristles and barks and struts about for a while, then goes back to the house, evidently thinking the hound a lunatic, which he is for the time being,--a monomaniac, the slave and victim of one idea. I saw the master of a hound one day arrest him in full course, to give one of the hunters time to get to a certain runway; the dog cried and struggled to free himself, and would listen to neither threats nor caresses. Knowing he must be hungry, I offered him my lunch, but he would not touch it. I put it in his mouth, but he threw it contemptuously from him. We coaxed and petted and rea.s.sured him, but he was under a spell; he was bereft of all thought or desire but the one pa.s.sion to pursue that trail.

THE TREE-TOAD

We can boast a greater a.s.sortment of toads and frogs in this country than can any other land. What a chorus goes up from our ponds and marshes in spring! The like of it cannot be heard anywhere else under the sun. In Europe it would certainly have made an impression upon the literature. An attentive ear will detect first one variety, then another, each occupying the stage from three or four days to a week. The latter part of April, when the little peeping frogs are in full chorus, one comes upon places, in his drives or walks late in the day, where the air fairly palpitates with sound; from every little marshy hollow and spring run there rises an impenetrable maze or cloud of shrill musical voices. After the peepers, the next frog to appear is the clucking frog, a rather small, dark-brown frog, with a harsh, clucking note, which later in the season becomes the well-known brown wood-frog.

Their chorus is heard for a few days only, while their sp.a.w.n is being deposited. In less than a week it ceases, and I never hear them again till the next April. As the weather gets warmer, the toads take to the water, and set up that long-drawn musical tr-r-r- r-r-r-r-ing note. The voice of the bullfrog, who calls, according to the boys, "jug o' rum," "jug o' rum," "pull the plug," "pull the plug," is not heard much before June. The peepers, the clucking frog, and the bullfrog are the only ones that call in chorus. The most interesting and the most shy and withdrawn of all our frogs and toads is the tree-toad,--the creature that, from the old apple or cherry tree, or red cedar, announces the approach of rain, and baffles your every effort to see or discover it. It has not (as some people imagine) exactly the power of the chameleon to render itself invisible by a.s.suming the color of the object it perches upon, but it sits very close and still, and its mottled back, of different shades of ashen gray, blends it perfectly with the bark of nearly every tree. The only change in its color I have ever noticed is that it is lighter on a light-colored tree, like the beech or soft maple, and darker on the apple, or cedar, or pine. Then it is usually hidden in some cavity or hollow of the tree, when its voice appears to come from the outside.

Most of my observations upon the habits of this creature run counter to the authorities I have been able to consult on the subject.

In the first place, the tree-toad is nocturnal in its habits, like the common toad. By day it remains motionless and concealed; by night it is as alert and active as an owl, feeding and moving about from tree to tree. I have never known one to change its position by day, and never knew one to fail to do so by night. Last summer one was discovered sitting against a window upon a climbing rosebush. The house had not been occupied for some days, and when the curtain was drawn the toad was discovered and closely observed.

His light gray color harmonized perfectly with the unpainted woodwork of the house. During the day he never moved a muscle, but next morning he was gone. A friend of mine caught one, and placed it under a tumbler on his table at night, leaving the edge of the gla.s.s raised about the eighth of an inch to admit the air.

During the night he was awakened by a strange sound in his room.

Pat, pat, pat went some object, now here, now there, among the furniture, or upon the walls and doors. On investigating the matter, he found that by some means his tree-toad had escaped from under the gla.s.s, and was leaping in a very lively manner about the room, producing the sound he had heard when it alighted upon the door, or wall, or other perpendicular surface.

The home of the tree-toad, I am convinced, is usually a hollow limb or other cavity in the tree; here he makes his headquarters, and pa.s.ses most of the day. For two years a pair of them frequented an old apple-tree near my house, occasionally sitting at the mouth of a cavity that led into a large branch, but usually their voices were heard from within the cavity itself. On one occasion, while walking in the woods in early May, I heard the voice of a tree-toad but a few yards from me. Cautiously following up the sound, I decided, after some delay, that it proceeded from the trunk of a small soft maple; the tree was hollow, the entrance to the interior being a few feet from the ground. I could not discover the toad, but was so convinced that it was concealed in the tree, that I stopped up the hole, determined to return with an axe, when I had time, and cut the trunk open. A week elapsed before I again went to the woods, when, on cutting into the cavity of the tree, I found a pair of tree-toads, male and female, and a large, sh.e.l.less snail.

Whether the presence of the snail was accidental, or whether these creatures a.s.sociated together for some purpose, I do not know. The male toad was easily distinguished from the female by its large head, and more thin, slender, and angular body. The female was much the more beautiful, both in form and color. The cavity, which was long and irregular, was evidently their home; it had been nicely cleaned out, and was a snug, safe apartment.

The finding of the two s.e.xes together, under such circ.u.mstances and at that time of the year, suggests the inquiry whether they do not breed away from the water, as others of our toads are known at times to do, and thus skip the tadpole state. I have several times seen the ground, after a June shower, swarming with minute toads, out to wet their jackets. Some of them were no larger than crickets. They were a long distance from the water, and had evidently been hatched on the land, and had never been polliwogs.

Whether the tree-toad breeds in trees or on the land, yet remains to be determined. [FOOTNOTE: It now (1895) seems well established that both common toads and tree-toads pa.s.s the first period of their lives in water as tadpoles, and that both undergo their metamorphosis when very small. As soon as the change is effected, the little toads leave the water and scatter themselves over the country with remarkable rapidity, traveling chiefly by night, but showing themselves in the daytime after showers.]

Another fact in the natural history of this creature, not set down in the books, is that they pa.s.s the winter in a torpid state in the ground, or in stumps and hollow trees, instead of in the mud of ponds and marshes, like true frogs, as we have been taught. The pair in the old apple-tree above referred to, I heard on a warm, moist day late in November, and again early in April. On the latter occasion, I reached my hand down into the cavity of the tree and took out one of the toads. It was the first I had heard, and I am convinced it had pa.s.sed the winter in the moist, mud-like ma.s.s of rotten wood that partially filled the cavity. It had a fresh, delicate tint, as if it had not before seen the light that spring.

The president of a Western college writes in "Science News" that two of his students found one in the winter in an old stump which they demolished; and a person whose veracity I have no reason to doubt sends me a specimen that he dug out of the ground in December while hunting for Indian relics. The place was on the top of a hill, under a pine-tree. The ground was frozen on the surface, and the toad was, of course, torpid.

During the present season, I obtained additional proof of the fact that the tree-toad hibernates on dry land. The 12th of November was a warm, spring-like day; wind southwest, with slight rain in the afternoon,--just the day to bring things out of their winter retreats. As I was about to enter my door at dusk, my eye fell upon what proved to be the large tree-toad in question, sitting on some low stone-work at the foot of a terrace a few feet from the house. I paused to observe his movements. Presently he started on his travels across the yard toward the lawn in front. He leaped about three feet at a time, with long pauses between each leap.

For fear of losing him as it grew darker, I captured him, and kept him under the coal sieve till morning. He was very active at night trying to escape. In the morning, I amused myself with him for some time in the kitchen. I found he could adhere to a window- pane, but could not ascend it; gradually his hold yielded, till he sprang off on the casing. I observed that, in sitting upon the floor or upon the ground, he avoided bringing his toes in contact with the surface, as if they were too tender or delicate for such coa.r.s.e uses, but sat upon the hind part of his feet. Said toes had a very bungling, awkward appearance at such times; they looked like hands encased in gray woolen gloves much too large for them. Their round, flattened ends, especially when not in use, had a comically helpless look.

After a while I let my prisoner escape into the open air. The weather had grown much colder, and there was a hint of coming frost. The toad took the hint at once, and, after hopping a few yards from the door to the edge of a gra.s.sy bank, began to prepare for winter. It was a curious proceeding. He went into the ground backward, elbowing himself through the turf with the sharp joints of his hind legs, and going down in a spiral manner. His progress was very slow: at night I could still see him by lifting the gra.s.s; and as the weather changed again to warm, with southerly winds before morning, he stopped digging entirely. The next day I took him out, and put him into a bottomless tub sunk into the ground and filled with soft earth, leaves, and leaf mould, where he pa.s.sed the winter safely, and came out fresh and bright in the spring.

The little peeping frogs lead a sort of arboreal life, too, a part of the season, but they are quite different from the true tree- toads above described. They appear to leave the marshes in May, and to take to the woods or bushes. I have never seen them on trees, but upon low shrubs. They do not seem to be climbers, but perchers. I caught one in May, in some low bushes a few rods from the swamp. It perched upon the small twigs like a bird, and would leap about among them, sure of its hold every time. I was first attracted by its piping. I brought it home, and it piped for one twilight in a bush in my yard and then was gone. I do not think they pipe much after leaving the water. I have found them early in April upon the ground in the woods, and again late in the fall.

In November, 1879, the warm, moist weather brought them out in numbers. They were hopping about everywhere upon the fallen leaves.

Within a small s.p.a.ce I captured six. Some of them were the hue of the tan-colored leaves, probably Pickering's hyla, and some were darker, according to the locality. Of course they do not go to the marshes to winter, else they would not wait so late in the season.

I examined the ponds and marshes, and found bullfrogs buried in the mud, but no peepers.

THE SPRING BIRDS

We never know the precise time the birds leave us in the fall: they do not go suddenly; their departure is like that of an army of occupation in no hurry to be off; they keep going and going, and we hardly know when the last straggler is gone. Not so their return in the spring: then it is like an army of invasion, and we know the very day when the first scouts appear. It is a memorable event.

Indeed, it is always a surprise to me, and one of the compensations of our abrupt and changeable climate, this suddenness with which the birds come in spring,--in fact, with which spring itself comes, alighting, maybe, to tarry only a day or two, but real and genuine, for all that. When March arrives, we do not know what a day may bring forth. It is like turning over a leaf, a new chapter of startling incidents lying just on the other side.

A few days ago, Winter had not perceptibly relaxed his hold; then suddenly he began to soften a little, and a warm haze to creep up from the south, but not a solitary bird, save the winter residents, was to be seen or heard. Next day the sun seemed to have drawn immensely nearer; his beams were full of power; and we said, "Behold the first spring morning! And, as if to make the prophecy complete, there is the note of a bluebird, and it is not yet nine o'clock." Then others, and still others, were heard. How did they know it was going to be a suitable day for them to put in an appearance? It seemed as if they must have been waiting somewhere close by for the first warm day, like actors behind the scenes,-- the moment the curtain was lifted, they were ready and rushed upon the stage. The third warm day, and, behold, all the princ.i.p.al performers come rushing in,--song sparrows, cow blackbirds, grackles, the meadowlark, cedar-birds, the phbe-bird, and, hark!

what bird laughter was that? the robins, hurrah! the robins! Not two or three, but a score or two of them; they are following the river valley north, and they stop in the trees from time to time, and give vent to their gladness. It is like a summer picnic of school-children suddenly let loose in a wood; they sing, shout, whistle, squeal, call, in the most blithesome strains. The warm wave has brought the birds upon its crest; or some barrier has given way, the levee of winter has broken, and spring comes like an inundation. No doubt, the snow and the frost will stop the creva.s.se again, but only for a brief season.

Between the 10th and the 15th of March, in the Middle and Eastern States, we are pretty sure to have one or more of these spring days. Bright days, clear days, may have been plenty all winter; but the air was a desert, the sky transparent ice; now the sky is full of radiant warmth, and the air of a half-articulate murmur and awakening. How still the morning is! It is at such times that we discover what music there is in the souls of the little slate- colored s...o...b..rds. How they squeal, and chatter, and chirp, and trill, always in scattered troops of fifty or a hundred, filling the air with a fine sibilant chorus! That joyous and childlike "chew," "chew," "chew" is very expressive. Through this medley of finer songs and calls, there is shot, from time to time, the clear, strong note of the meadowlark. It comes from some field or tree farther away, and cleaves the air like an arrow. The reason why the birds always appear first in the morning, and not in the afternoon, is that in migrating they travel by night, and stop and feed and disport themselves by day. They come by the owl train, and are here before we are up in the morning.

A LONE QUEEN

Once, while walking in the woods, I saw quite a large nest in the top of a pine-tree. On climbing up to it, I found that it had originally been a crow's nest. Then a red squirrel had appropriated it; he had filled up the cavity with the fine inner bark of the red cedar, and made himself a dome-shaped nest upon the crow's foundation of coa.r.s.e twigs. It is probable that the flying squirrel, or the white-footed mouse, had been the next tenants, for the finish of the interior suggested their dainty taste. But when I found it, its sole occupant was a b.u.mblebee,--the mother or queen bee, just planting her colony. She buzzed very loud and complainingly, and stuck up her legs in protest against my rude inquisitiveness, but refused to vacate the premises. She had only one sack or cell constructed, in which she had deposited her first egg, and, beside that, a large loaf of bread, probably to feed the young brood with, as they should be hatched. It looked like Boston brown bread, but I examined it and found it to be a ma.s.s of dark brown pollen, quite soft and pasty. In fact, it was unleavened bread, and had not been got at the baker's. A few weeks later, if no accident befell her, she had a good working colony of a dozen or more bees.

This was not an unusual incident. Our b.u.mblebee, so far as I have observed, invariably appropriates a mouse-nest for the site of its colony, never excavating a place in the ground, nor conveying materials for a nest, to be lined with wax, like the European species. Many other of our wild creatures take up with the leavings of their betters or strongers. Neither the skunk nor the rabbit digs his own hole, but takes up with that of a wood-chuck, or else hunts out a natural den among the rocks. In England the rabbit burrows in the ground to such an extent that in places the earth is honeycombed by them, and the walker steps through the surface into their galleries. Our white-footed mouse has been known to take up his abode in a hornet's nest, furnishing the interior to suit his taste. A few of our birds also avail themselves of the work of others, as the t.i.tmouse, the brown creeper, the bluebird, and the house wren. But in every case they refurnish the tenement: the wren carries feathers into the cavity excavated by the woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, the bluebird carries in fine straws, and the chickadee lays down a fine wool mat upon the floors. When the high-hole occupies the same cavity another year, he deepens and enlarges it; the phbe-bird, in taking up her old nest, puts in a new lining; so does the robin; but cases of reoccupancy of an old nest by the last-named birds are rare.

A BOLD LEAPER

One reason, doubtless, why squirrels are so bold and reckless in leaping through the trees is, that, if they miss their hold and fall, they sustain no injury. Every species of tree squirrel seems to be capable of a sort of rudimentary flying,--at least of making itself into a parachute, so as to ease or break a fall or a leap from a great height. The so-called flying squirrel does this the most perfectly. It opens its furry vestments, leaps into the air, and sails down the steep incline from the top of one tree to the foot of the next as lightly as a bird. But other squirrels know the same trick, only their coat-skirts are not so broad. One day my dog treed a red squirrel in a tall hickory that stood in a meadow on the side of a steep hill. To see what the squirrel would do when closely pressed, I climbed the tree. As I drew near, he took refuge in the topmost branch, and then, as I came on, he boldly leaped into the air, spread himself out upon it, and, with a quick, tremulous motion of his tail and legs, descended quite slowly and landed upon the ground thirty feet below me, apparently none the worse for the leap, for he ran with great speed and escaped the dog in another tree.

A recent American traveler in Mexico gives a still more striking instance of this power of squirrels partially to neutralize the force of gravity when leaping or falling through the air. Some boys had caught a Mexican black squirrel, nearly as large as a cat.

It had escaped from them once, and, when pursued, had taken a leap of sixty feet, from the top of a pine-tree down upon the roof of a house, without injury. This feat had led the grandmother of one of the boys to declare that the squirrel was bewitched, and the boys proposed to put the matter to further test by throwing the squirrel down a precipice six hundred feet high. Our traveler interfered, to see that the squirrel had fair play. The prisoner was conveyed in a pillow-slip to the edge of the cliff, and the slip opened, so that he might have his choice, whether to remain a captive or to take the leap. He looked down the awful abyss, and then back and sidewise,--his eyes glistening, his form crouching. Seeing no escape in any other direction, "he took a flying leap into s.p.a.ce, and fluttered rather than fell into the abyss below. His legs began to work like those of a swimming poodle-dog, but quicker and quicker, while his tail, slightly elevated, spread out like a feather fan. A rabbit of the same weight would have made the trip in about twelve seconds; the squirrel protracted it for more than half a minute," and "landed on a ledge of limestone, where we could see him plainly squat on his hind legs and smooth his ruffled fur, after which he made for the creek with a flourish of his tail, took a good drink, and scampered away into the willow thicket."

The story at first blush seems incredible, but I have no doubt our red squirrel would have made the leap safely; then why not the great black squirrel, since its parachute would be proportionately large?

The tails of the squirrels are broad and long and flat, not short and small like those of gophers, chipmunks, woodchucks, and other ground rodents, and when they leap or fall through the air the tail is arched and rapidly vibrates. A squirrel's tail, therefore, is something more than ornament, something more than a flag; it not only aids him in flying, but it serves as a cloak, which he wraps about him when he sleeps. Thus, some animals put their tails to various uses, while others seem to have no use for them whatever.

What use for a tail has a wood-chuck, or a weasel, or a mouse? Has not the mouse yet learned that it could get in its hole sooner if it had no tail? The mole and the meadow mouse have very short tails. Rats, no doubt, put their tails to various uses. The rabbit has no use for a tail,--it would be in its way; while its manner of sleeping is such that it does not need a tail to tuck itself up with, as do the c.o.o.n and the fox. The dog talks with his tail; the tail of the possum is prehensile; the porcupine uses his tail in climbing and for defense; the beaver as a tool or trowel; while the tail of the skunk serves as a screen behind which it masks its terrible battery.