Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/426

420 swept daily down the valley, and wrecked all who were then afloat. It was impossible not to feel pity for these self-haunted fugitives. A mere cloud passing over the sun affrighted them; the approach of horse, cow, dog, or man alike roused their impotent anger, and their little bodies were convulsively pressed against the never-failing stone of vantage, whilst they uttered cries of rage. I collected five hundred skins, with the idea of making a rug, but was surprised to find that a portion of the rump was nearly always denuded of hair, and it was long before I discovered that this was caused by the habit of nervously backing up against a stone, of which I have just spoken. As this action is excited by every appearance of an enemy, it seems surprising that a natural callosity should not take the place of so constant a lesion; possibly, however, the time during which this lesion occurs is too short to cause constitutional change.

Early in the autumn, and just a year after their arrival at Heimdalen, the western migration commenced anew. Every morning I found swarms of lemmings swimming the lake diagonally instead of diverging from their course so as to go round it, and mounting the steep slopes of Heimdals-hö on their way to the coast, where the harassed crowd, thinned by the unceasing attacks of the wolf, the fox, and the dog, and even the reindeer, pursued by eagle, hawk, and owl, and never spared by man himself, yet still a vast multitude, plunges into the Atlantic Ocean on the first calm day, and perishes with its front still pointing westward. No faint heart lingers on the way; and no survivor returns to the mountains.

There appears to have been a difficulty in keeping these restless creatures in captivity, both because they escape through incredibly small apertures (generally, however, dying from internal injuries thus caused), and because they will gnaw through a stout wooden cage in one night, and devote every spare moment to this one purpose, with a pertinacity worthy of Baron Trenck. At all events, few have been brought alive to this country, and none have survived. At present (February, 1877) I have one which I have preserved since September last, defeating his attempts at escape by lining the cage with tin, and allowing him a plentiful supply of fresh water, in which he is always dabbling. With the approach of winter all his attempts to escape ceased, and I now always take the little stranger for an airing in my closed hands whilst his bed is being made and his room cleaned out. He seems to like this, but after a few minutes a gentle nibble at my finger testifies to his impatience, and if this be not attended to the biting progresses in a crescendo scale until it becomes unbearable, although it has never under these circumstances drawn blood. My little prisoner shows few other signs of tameness, but the fits of jumping, biting, and snarling rage have almost ceased. I expect, however, that with the return of spring the migratory impulse will be renewed, and that he will kill himself against the wires of his cage like a swallow.

The reader is now in a position to consider the three questions raised by the above facts, and those questions are as follows: 1. Whence do the lemmings come? 2. Whither do they go? 3. Why do they migrate at all? With regard to the first, no one has yet supplied an answer. They certainly do not exist in my neighborhood during the intervals of migration; and the Kjolen range was probably selected as their habitat, not because it was proved to be so, but because so little is known about it at all. The answer to the second question is certain: they go to the sea. Those on the east of the backbone of Norway go to the Gulf of Bothnia, and those on the west to the Atlantic Ocean; and out of eighteen migrations which have been investigated, one only, and that very doubtful, is reported to have been directed southward. The question as to the cause of these migrations remains, and is a very difficult one to answer. We have been told that the foreknowledge of approaching severe weather predetermines the exodus: my experience, however, contradicts this, and it may be dismissed as merely a popular superstition. Unusual reproduction and consequent deficiency of food is a more plausible theory, but I have always noticed that, just as with the swallow, a few individuals have preceded the main body, and that during the first autumn the numbers are never large, but after a winter spent beneath the snow they begin to breed with the first days of summer, and thus develop the extraordinary multitude which is, as it well may be, the astonishment and terror of the country. It appears, then, that excessive reproduction is rather the result than the cause of migration. It has also been suggested that the course taken by the lemmings follows the natural declivities of the country, but a reference to the maps will show that in that case nearly all the Norwegian migrations should take a 