Page:Wild folk - Samuel Scoville.djvu/164

140 Like that flyer, the shrew can detect an obstacle in time to avoid it, even when running at full speed, by becoming conscious of some subtle change in the air-pressure.

Among the great throng of little wild folk playing at hide-and-seek with death among the fallen logs, and in the labyrinth of passageways in the beds of sand and moss and fern, no one was swifter than this one, the smallest of them all. A flash here, a glimpse farther on, and he was gone, too fast to be followed by human eyes. In one of his rare pauses he might have been mistaken for a tiny mouse by reason of his general coloration; yet the shrew is as different from the mouse as a lynx from a wolf. No mouse has long, crooked, crocodile jaws, filled with perhaps the fiercest fighting teeth of any mammal; nor does any mouse have the tremendous jaw muscles which stood out under the soft fur of this beastling.

To-day, as the shrew sniffed here and there, trying to locate trails which a weasel or a dog could have followed instantly, his quick ear caught some tiny sound from the near-by burrow of a meadow-mouse. With a curious pattering, burrowing run, unlike the leaps and bounds of the mice-people, he started unerringly toward a narrow opening almost hidden under an overhanging patch of yellow-green sphagnum moss. Disappearing down the tunnel, he dashed along furiously, while his long widespread whiskers gave him instant notice of the turns and twists of the tunnel, which he threaded at full speed.