Animals Books

To this day it is hard to understand how any eyes could have found them, they were so perfectly hidden. I was following a little brook, which led me by its singing to a deep dingle in the very heart of the big woods. A great fallen tree lay across my path and made a bridge over the stream. Now, bridges are for crossing; that is plain to even the least of the wood folk; so I sat down on the mossy trunk... more...

THE OX. An Ox has two horns, four legs, and four feet. The ox draws the plough and the cart. He is large and strong, and he works hard for man. He eats grass, and hay, and corn; and drinks water. A Cow is not so large as an ox. She does not work, but she gives milk. Butter and cheese are made of milk. A Calf is a young cow or ox. THE HORSE. A Horse can walk, or trot or run, with a man on his back. He... more...

I. FOX-WAYS. Did you ever meet a fox face to face, surprising him quite as much as yourself? If so, you were deeply impressed, no doubt, by his perfect dignity and self-possession. Here is how the meeting generally comes about. It is a late winter afternoon. You are swinging rapidly over the upland pastures, or loitering along the winding old road through the woods. The color deepens in the west; the... more...

INTRODUCTION. A considerable portion of the contents of the present volume formed the zoological section of a much more comprehensive work recently published, on the history and present condition of Ceylon. But its inclusion there was a matter of difficulty; for to have altogether omitted the chapters on Natural History would have impaired the completeness of the plan on which I had attempted to... more...

CHAPTER I THE LITTLE FURRY ONES THAT SLIDE DOWN HILL In the brown, balsam-smelling log cabin on the shores of Silverwater, loveliest and loneliest of wilderness lakes, the Babe's great thirst for information seemed in a fair way to be satisfied. Young as he was, and city-born, the lure of the wild had nevertheless already caught him, and the information that he thirsted for so insatiably was all... more...

Last Bull That was what two grim old sachems of the Dacotahs had dubbed him; and though his official title, on the lists of the Zoölogical Park, was “Kaiser,” the new and more significant name had promptly supplanted it. The Park authorities—people of imagination and of sentiment, as must all be who would deal successfully with wild animals—had felt at once that the name aptly embodied the... more...

I. MEGALEEP THE WANDERER. Megaleep is the big woodland caribou of the northern wilderness. His Milicete name means The Wandering One, but it ought to mean the Mysterious and the Changeful as well. If you hear that he is bold and fearless, that is true; and if you are told that he is shy and wary and inapproachable, that is also true. For he is never the same two days in succession. At once shy and... more...

Some of the Pleistocene mammals from San Josecito Cave, near Aramberri, Nuevo León, México, collected by field parties of the California Institute of Technology under the direction of the late Professor Chester Stock, have been reported previously (see Furlong, 1943; Cushing, 1945; Stock, 1950; Hooper, 1952; Findley, 1953; Stock, 1953; Handley, 1955; Jackway, 1958). In 1950, Professor Stock loaned a... more...

CHAPTER IThe Sound in the Night UPON the moonlit stillness came suddenly a far-off, muffled, crashing sound. Just once it came, then once again the stillness of the wilderness night, the stillness of vast, untraversed solitude. The Boy lifted his eyes and glanced across the thin reek of the camp-fire at Jabe Smith, who sat smoking contemplatively. Answering the glance, the woodsman muttered “old tree... more...

SQUIRRELS Walking through the early October woods one day, I came upon a place where the ground was thickly strewn with very large unopened chestnut burrs. On examination I found that every burr had been cut square off with about an inch of the stem adhering, and not one had been left on the tree. It was not accident, then, but design. Whose design? A squirrel’s. The fruit was the finest I had ever... more...