The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-01-04
FOOTPRINTS.

A snowfall is leaf from Nature note-b book, and upon if. the creatures oi
 the fields and woods record their sever
 al doings. As the days go by, other re-
 cords are made over the face of the | first ones, until at last comes the thaw and wipes them all out. If we go for a walk while the page lies white and | fresh, and before the notes have be-
 come illegible, we may read what our wild neighbors have to say for them- selves.
 A few days ago, new page lay upon
 the earth, and I went out to see what
 notes were written. I started down a little lane which had a rail fence On
 one side and a stone wall on the other. had not gone far when l saw the
 track of some animal which had cross
 ed my path almost at right angles.
 Here was the first note. and all that
 was necessary was to translate 1t.
 q am a skunk 1t began. You can
 see that by the deliberate manner in
 which I put my feet down, and by the
 marks of my prominent claws, By the
 position of my footprints you see the
 direction I came from, and if you will
 glance back along my tracks for fifty
 yards. you will see the mouth of my
 den, that old woodchuck burrow under
 the wall. I'm just starting out to look for my breakfast"
 This was all l could make out from where l stood, but, as newspaper man would say, there seemed to be good story" in that so I followed 1t up. The trail led under the lowest rail of the fence, across the corner of q meadow and into a hollow, we'll filled with the decayed stumps of old trees. Here the notes of the skunk be- came transferable again.
 Some of these stumps should con- tain wild n1ice and Pm going to get some if I can, The wood in this one is too hard--you can see where l tried to scratch it--but the one over here looks more promising. Yes, there was a mouse in this one--there's the little burrow which I laid open with my claws, and I made a jump for him as where you see the prints of my feet all together. But AS you see there is not a drop of blood nor a trace of hair and the tiny marks of the mouse's paws close to the hole under that stone, show you very plainly how he escap- ed me. Well, there's no use waiting around here. I'll go up on the hillside. Fla! ha! there is grouse track leading under those snow covered bushes; there's something worth looking into. Sold again. The tracks run out on the other side; guess I'll go down to the brook there and get drink anyhow"
 But the trail did not quite reach to the brook. It ended abruptly in a great blurred depression in the snow, which was dyed red in streaks and strewn with tufts of fur. Here was an- other note but in a different hand l writing Translated, it ran:
 T am great-horned owl, and they l were my talons which put an end to l he skunk. The fox and the raccoon l nay turn up their noses at such food, | put when I am hungry it's good | though for me"
 I followed the course of the brook | lntil it widened out into broad | tream, frozen over, but open in places ] llong the edges. At one of these open- ngs the muskrat had begun to write l lls notes. They explained in a more | r less lucid manner that the writer lad left his burrow under the bank nd had set out across the field in 1 earch of food. I followed the trail made by the small front paws and the arge hind paws with the line which he tail had made running between hem, to gap in stone wall on the ther side of which was a cornfield. lere the notes explained as follows:
 I'm awfully fond of corn. especially ] winter, and I'll go to a good deal of f trouble to get it. But there's pre- ious little left for me; only a grain or wo here and there; and I have to 'alk around long way to find that. here was kernel here though, where ve scraped the hole in the snow;. and