Page:Wild folk - Samuel Scoville.djvu/162

138 the chewinks called "Drink your tea," and the Maryland yellow-throat sang "Witchery, witchery, witchery," while jays squalled in the distance, and crimson-crested cardinals whistled from the thickets. In the sky, like grim black aeroplanes, wheeled the turkey buzzards, sailing in circles without ever a wing stroke. Gray pine-swifts, with brilliant blue patches on their sides, scurried up and down tree trunks and along fallen logs, and brown cottontail rabbits hopped across the paths, showing their white powder puffs at each jump. A huge, umber-brown-and-white pine snake, with a strange pointed head, crawled slowly through the brush while rows of painted turtles dotted the snags which thrust out here and there above the stream.

Earth, air, and water, all swarmed with life at this dawn of the year. The underground folk were awake, too. Down below the surface, the industrious mole, with his plush fur and spade-like hands, dug incessantly his hunting-tunnels for earthworms. Above him, in wet places, his cousin, the star-nosed mole, whose nose has twenty-two little fingers, drove passages through the lowest part of the moss beds and the soft upper mould.

Still nearer the surface, just under the leaf-carpet, sometimes digging his own way, sometimes using the tunnels of the meadow-mice and deer-mice, and occasionally flashing out into the open air, lived the smallest mammal. Of all the tribes of earth, of all the bat-folk who fly the air, or the water-people who swim the seas and rivers and lakes, no mammal