Shrew-mouse

“ In one nomos or province the shrew-mouse was sacred, and a satirical, obscene papyrus in Turin shows us a war between the cats and mice; the Papyrus Ebers contains poisons for mice. We ourselves possess a shrew-mouse exquisitely wrought in bronze. ”

“ The shrew mouse, especially in winter, fixes its residence in stables, hay-lofts, or barns; it feeds on grain, insects, and putrid flesh. It also resides in woods and fields, where it lives on grain; it sometimes conceals itself under moss, leaves, the trunks of trees, and sometimes in holes abandoned by moles, or in holes of a smaller size, which it digs for itself, with its claws and snout. The shrew produces, it is said, as many young at a time as the common mouse, but not so frequently. ”

“ If a shrew-mouse runs over your foot, it portends ill-luck, sometimes the coming ill-luck is defined as paralysis of the foot. In Sussex the country people have an idea that the shrew-mouse is unable to cross a path which has been trodden by man. Whenever it attempts to do so it is said to be immediately struck dead, and hence the number of shrew-mice which may be found lying dead in lanes or on field footpaths. If a hare crosses the path of a woman with child, she must instantly stoop down and tear her shift, or the child will have a hare-lip, or ’ar-shotten lip, as it is called (Shr.) ”

“ Moreover, in their hunting-raids, which are so greatly to our advantage, shrew-mice never do us the slightest injury of any sort, as they never bore tunnels, but merely use the natural cracks in the soil. They cannot be reproached with severing roots or throwing up mounds of earth, as moles do; and yet they are perhaps more an object of general execration than the latter. It is considered a praiseworthy act to crush them every time one gets a chance.
Shrew-mouse
“How has so tiny, pleasing, and useful a creature managed thus to incur the hatred of man? ”

“ Now a shrew-ash is an ash whose twigs or branches, when gently applied to the limbs of cattle, will immediately relieve the pains which a beast suffers from the running of a shrew-mouse over the part affected: for it is supposed that a shrew-mouse is of so baneful and deleterious a nature, that wherever it creeps over a beast, be it horse, cow, or sheep, the suffering animal is afflicted with cruel anguish, and threatened with the loss of the use of the limb. ”

“ It is said that the shrew-mouse bites horses’ feet and leaves incurable wounds. But how can a shrew-mouse, whose head is at most no larger than a pea, bite a horse and pierce its hide which is the thickness of a finger or more? ”

“ On that day, among the mouse-tracks on the snow there showed another faint trail, which looked like a string of tiny exclamation marks with a tail-mark between them. It was the track of the masked shrew, the smallest mammal of the Eastern states. This tiny fierce fragment of flesh and blood is only about the length of a man’s little finger. So swift are the functions of its wee body that, deprived of food for six hours, the shrew starves and dies. ”

“ The mouse bites. The shrew eats. Boring in, the shrew secures a grip with its long, crooked, crocodile jaws filled with fierce teeth, and devours its way like fire through skin and flesh and bone, worrying out and swallowing mouthfuls of blood and flesh until the mouse falls over dead. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In a similar manner, too, the shrew-mouse and the heron are ever on the watch for each other’s young; and the ægithus,3139 so small a bird as it is, has an antipathy to the ass; for the latter, when scratching itself, rubs its body against the brambles, and so crushes the bird’s nest; a thing of which it stands in such dread, that if it only hears the voice of the ass when it brays, it will throw its eggs out of the nest, and the young ones themselves will sometimes fall to the ground in their fright; hence it is that it will fly at the ass, and peck at its sores with its beak. ”

“ This is the Common Shrew or Shrew-mouse, an inoffensive and useful creature, for its food is restricted to insects, snails, woodlice and the other small fry that annoy man without the latter being able to do much in retaliation. ”

“ The cat, taking it for a mouse, sometimes chases it, but, repelled by its odor, never eats it. The first to observe this fact said to himself: ‘As the cat does not dare eat it the shrew-mouse must be venomous.’ Ever since then this false belief has passed for truth in the country, and no one has taken the trouble to look into the matter more closely; so that the poor little shrew-mouse, one of our most useful and harmless helpers, falls a victim to the stupidity of man, whose gardens it protects. ”

“ The mouse, which is not the field-mouse, as Halliwell states, but an animal of a different order of quadrupeds, has a very sharp snout. Shrewd means sharp generally. Its bad sense is only incidental. They seem connected with scratch; screw; shrags, the end of sticks or furze (Halliwell) ; to shred (A.-S., screadan, but which must be a secondary form of the verb) . That the shrew-mouse is called in Latin sorex, seems to be an accidental coincidence. ”

“ The tail of a shrew, when burned and powdered, was considered as a certain remedy for the bite of a dog; only the tail must be cut from a living shrew.
I have already made casual mention of the shrews of the land.
Two species of land-shrews are recognised as inhabitants of England. One is the common SHREW, or SHREW-MOUSE (Sorex vulgáris) , which for a long time was thought to be identical with the water-shrew. The fringed feet and tail, however, afford sufficient indications that it is a distinct species. ”

“ De Buffon, I know, has described the water shrew-mouse: but still I am pleased to find you have discovered it in Lincolnshire, for the reason I have given in the article on the white hare.
As a neighbour was lately ploughing in a dry chalky field, far removed from any water, he turned out a water rat, that was curiously laid up in an hybernaculum artificially formed of grass and leaves. At one end of the burrow lay above a gallon of potatoes regularly stowed, on which it was to have supported itself for the winter. ”

“ There are twenty upper teeth with the formula given above, the ears are well developed, the tail is long and evenly haired, and the aperture of the generative organs in at least one of the sexes is distinct from the vent. The common shrew-mouse (Sorex araneus) has a distribution co-extensive with that of the genus in the Old World, and the North American S. richardsoni can scarcely be regarded as more than a local race. A few species, such as Sorex hydrodomus of Alaska and S. palustris of the United States, have fringes of long hairs on the feet, and are aquatic in habit. ”

“ But such a mistake on the part of any creature not larger than a ground-sparrow or wood-mouse or lizard would have resulted in instant doom; for this tiny beast, indomitable as a terrier and greedy for meat as a mink, was the mole-shrew.
Having devoured the fat grub, and finding his appetite still unappeased, the shrew at once resumed his vehement digging. His marvellously developed nostrils had assured him that a little farther on beneath the turf were more grubs, or well-conditioned earthworms, or the stupid big red-brown beetles called "Maybugs." ”

“ Mice larger and much more powerful than the shrew are persistently attacked and, finally giving out, are pounced upon and the flesh torn from their heads and necks with ravening eagerness. One day a passing observer heard a loud squealing on a railroad bank where an examination revealed a short-tailed shrew dragging away a nearly dead pine mouse, though the mouse was much the heavier. The notes of shrews are a fine tremulous squeak which becomes a longer, harsher, and more twittering or chattering cry when they are angry. ”

“ A shrew ash was made thus: into the body of the tree a deep hole was bored with an auger, and a poor devoted shrew mouse was thrust in alive, and plugged in, no doubt with several quaint incantations long since forgotten. As the ceremonies necessary for such a consecration are no longer understood, all succession is at an end, and no such tree is known to subsist in the manor or hundred."
It appears that similar powers for evil have also been attributed, in parts at least of Great Britain, to field mice, which by creeping over the backs of sheep were thought to produce paralysis. ”

“ The common shrew, or, properly, shrew-mouse, which in England is by far the commoner of the two, is a small animal about the size of a mouse, which it somewhat resembles in the shape of its body, tail and feet. ”

“ Now it was a custom amongst our forefathers to endeavour to provide a remedy against the baneful influence of the shrew-mouse by plugging the wretched animal alive in a hole made in the body of an ash tree, any branch of which was thenceforth held to be possessed of a power to cure the disease caused by the mouse. It thereupon occurred to me that just as brock, a still existing name for the badger, is clearly from the Saxon broc, persecution, {382} in allusion to the custom of baiting the animal; so schreava might be from schræf, a hollow, in allusion to the hole in the ash tree ”

“ In very cold weather they even find their way into stables, where they live on cockroaches and wood-lice; but at the approach of summer they are off again to the open fields, where they complete the mole’s work of extermination. Or they may seek some garden, where they protect the wall-fruit and the vegetable patches from the devouring [82] insect hordes without ever touching any of the growing crops themselves. The teeth of the shrew-mouse are not made for the chewing of vegetable food; like the mole, this tiny creature is carnivorous. ”

“ Again, they say the shrew-mouse is venomous even for man. Some time ago, children, I told you about the viper.1 You [83] know what its weapons are,—two long, sharp teeth or fangs having little channels through which it introduces a drop of venom into the wound it inflicts. Well, I assure you the shrew-mouse has no weapon like the viper’s; it has neither fangs nor a poison-sac, but is wholly harmless to man and horse. Insects alone need fear its fine teeth,—not that they are poisoned in any way, but because they crunch their little victims very neatly. ”

“ Round and round the storehouse the battle surged for a long half hour, with the shrew always between the doorway and his struggling, leaping opponents. [Pg 143] The grain-fed mice lacked the blood-bought endurance of their opponent. The young mouse who had led the shrew to the storehouse was the first to go. In the very middle of a leap, he staggered and fell at the feet of his enemy. Instantly the long curved jaws closed on his head, and the fierce teeth of the shrew crunched into his brain. ”

“ The shrew is smaller than the common mouse, resembles the mole in its snout, which is longer than the jaw-bones; in its eyes which, though larger than those of the mole, are in the same manner concealed, and smaller than those of the mouse; in the number of its toes, having five on each foot, in its tail and legs, particularly the hind ones, which are shorter than those of the mouse; in its ears, and lastly, in its teeth. This extremely little creature has a strong smell peculiar to itself, and so offensive to cats, that though they chace and kill, they will not eat it. ”

“ Now, at this season, in this universal redness of the earth where trees and bracken grow, we see that Nature is justified in having given that colour—red and reddish-yellow—to all or to most of her woodland mammals. Fox and foumart and weasel and stoat; the hare too; the bright squirrel; the dormouse and harvest-mouse; the bank-vole and the wood-mouse. Even the common shrew and lesser shrew, though they rarely come out by day, have a reddish tinge on their fur. Water-shrew and water-vole inhabit the banks of streams, and are safer without such a colour ”

“ Many of them are found starved to death on the melting snow, having crept up from their underground burrows through the shafts made by grass and weed-stems. Wandering over the white waste, they lose their way [Pg 43] and, failing to find food, starve before the sun is half way down the sky. As the shrew does not hibernate, his whole life is a swift hunt for food; for every day this apparently eyeless, earless animal must eat its own weight in flesh. The weasels kill from blood-lust, but the shrews kill for their very life’s sake. It is a fearsome sight to see a shrew attack a mouse. ”

“ And, thirdly, you will see that its tail, instead of gradually tapering to a pointed tip, is comparatively short, and is squared in a very curious manner. The fact is that the little animal is not a mouse at all, but a kind of shrew, of which there are many American species. One is large, and pushes through the top-soil like a mole. Another, smaller, is blackish, and has a short tail. The commonest one is mouse-gray and only two inches long plus a very long tail. It is fond of water, but has no such interesting habits as those of the European shrew next described. ”