Page:Wild folk - Samuel Scoville.djvu/81

Rh late in the afternoon, and an hour before sunset was out again. Here and there, through the bushes and among the trees, he tacked and zigzagged in an apparently absent-minded way. Yet nothing that he could eat escaped those small deep-set eyes or that long pointed nose. Near the edge of the woods he passed under a sugar-maple tree. On a lower limb sat Chickaree, the irritable, explosive red squirrel, nibbling away at a long cylindrical object which he held tightly clasped in his forepaws. As the skunk passed underneath, the squirrel stopped to scold at him on general principles, and became so emphatic in his remarks that he lost his hold of what he had been eating, and it fell directly in front of the plodding skunk. It was only an icicle, but after one sniff the skunk proceeded to crunch it down eagerly while the red squirrel raved overhead. The day before, the squirrel had nibbled a hole in the bark of one of the maple limbs, to taste the sweet sap which the thaw had started flowing; and during the night the running sap had frozen into a long sweet icicle, the candy of the wild folk, which heretofore only the squirrels had enjoyed.

The last bit of frozen sweetness swallowed, the skunk ambled up the hillside. Suddenly he stopped, and sniffed at a little ridge in the snow which hardly showed upon the surface. Hardly had he poked his pointed nose into the hummock, before it burst like a bomb, and out from the snow started a magnificent cock grouse. During the storm he had plunged into the drift for shelter, and the warmth of his body had