It is pretty to
see the footprints of these small shrewmice on the surface of the fresh
fallen snow in the deep forest glades. They are not dormant during the
winter, like many of the mouse tribe, for they are up and abroad at all
seasons; for however stormy and severe the weather may be, they do not
seem to heed its inclemency. Surely, children, there is One who cares for
the small tender things of earth, and shelters them from the rude blasts.
Nimble-foot and Silver-nose often saw their cousins, the black squirrels,
playing in the sunshine, chasing each other merrily up and down the trees
or over the brush-heaps; their jetty coats and long feathery tails forming
a striking contrast with the whiteness of the snow. Sometimes they saw a
few red squirrels too, but there was generally war between them and the
black ones.
In these lonely forests everything seems still and silent during the long
wintry season, as if death had spread a white pall over the earth and
hushed every living thing into silence. Few sounds are heard through the
winter days to break the deathlike silence that reigns around, excepting
the sudden rending and cracking of the trees in the frosty air, the fall
of a decayed branch, the tapping of a solitary woodpecker--two or three
small species of which still remain after all the summer-birds are flown--
and the gentle, weak chirp of the little tree-creeper, as it runs up and
down the hemlocks and pines, searching the crevices of the bark for
insects.
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