The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-04-07
FOOT PRINTS IN THE WOODS.

The late-llngering snow makes the
 tracking of animals much easier than
 is usual in New Hampshire, at this time of year. Not only does one see on every hand such trails as have been
 seen all winter, but to these are now added the footprints of skunks rac- eoons, woodchucks, chipmunks and fly squirrels-creatures which sleep away all or part of each cold season.
 Yesterday I was in the woods all day, examining these interesting records, and occasionally taking a photograph
 of one which happened to be new to me. Ephemeral as these records are they are so beautiful that it always seems a pity to destroy one needlessly, and, when possible, avoid treadlng on them as I avoid treading upon flowers.
 Down the first valley I came to, a fox has passed-a small fox, vixen I prints-and I followed the trail to see where she had been, and wtiat she had been doing. She had followed the bank of brook for bit, and then turned off through spruce thicket, and across an old wool road, where she had stopped to sniff at a hole which had been made by grouse, But it was evident that the bird had flown before the arrival of the fox, who had
 wasted no time in useless digging, but had trotted along in search of some thing more satisfying than the odor of a departed dinner And in hollow a cb hp
 thing. Whether her sharp ears had caught the deak of a mouse under the snow, or whether her keen nose had detected the odor who can tell? At any rate, she had burrowed into the white drift, nearly a foot of loose snow, had broken through the hard crust of an earlier snowfall, and to the ground below, to apparently the very spot on which a meadow mouse had made her nest of dried grass The material of the nest had been scattered, but whether the occupants had been cap- tured or not, there was no way of tell- ing. There were no bloodstains present, at all events, and 1t would certainly seem that wlde-awake meadow mouse would hear the fox digging, and that she would have ample time to es- cape along one of her numerous run ways before her enemy reached the nest. After this work, the vixen had run off again, and very shortly had been joined by another fox. much larger one, whose footprints usually kept the line made by her her. Now and then, however, 1t was evident that both foxes had stopped to romp to- gether cutting up the surace o the snow several feet In diameter followed the tracks to the western slope of hill, where both animals had entered burrow. The den was not a new one, and indeed 1t would be hard for fox to dig q new one while the surface of the ground Is frozen as it is here at present, but per haps they had opened up a new tunnel on the inside. This is the season at which foxes have their young and no doubt, had I dug out that burrow. I should have found a family of blinking blue-eyed cubs, innocent as the May flower under the snow, yet destined to become stealthy craft killers of game and raiders of henroosts. Verify. the laws of heredity are relentless
 Clambering over hill-top, bare of trees, l came on the trail of raccoon the first l had seen this spring; it was a very different trail from that of the fox, which consists of an almost which consists of an almost straight line of roundish prints. The raccoon's trail showed two lines of footmarks larger than the fox's and longer in The fox, in walking or trotting, places one fore foot almost directly in front of the other, and his hind foot follow in the same tracks. Moreover, the fox and the dog treads on his toes only The raccoon on the other hand. does not place one foot in front of the other, but makes two distinct lines of tracks one with his right feet and one with his left, and as fle treads on his whole foot, like
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