Shrubbery

“ ALL day long we sped through a mountainous country whose peaks were bright with sunshine, whose hillsides were dotted with pretty villas sitting in the midst of gardens and shrubbery, and whose deep ravines were cool and shady, and looked ever so inviting from where we and the birds were winging our flight through the sultry upper air. ”

“ One beat of its wide, gorgeous wings uplifted its light body as a breath softly uplifts a tuft of thistle-down. The baffled shrew jumped straight into the air, but in vain; and the great butterfly went flickering aimlesly over the pasture to find some less perilous basking-place.
Angered by this failure, the shrew descended the stone heap and scurried over to the fence, poking his nose under every tussock of weeds in search of the nest of some ground-bird. Along parallel with the fence he hunted, keeping out about a foot from the lowest rail. He found no nest ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not even the long-eared rabbit can detect the faintest shade of a sound quicker than the shrew, and only the bat equals his sense of touch. [Pg 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. ”

“ In the stem of an ash-tree a hole was bored; into the hole a poor shrew was thrust alive, and the orifice immediately closed with a wooden plug. The animal strength of the shrew passed by absorption into the substance of the tree, which ever after cured shrew-struck animals by the touch of a leafy branch.
The poor creature that was imprisoned, Ariel-like, in the tree, was, fortunately for itself, not gifted with Ariel’s powers of life; and the orifice of the hole being closed by the plug, we may hope that its sufferings were not long, and that it perished immediately for want of air. ”

“ Look at that poor shrew-mouse, for example, wriggling feebly on his stake, which the cunning bird has so managed to intertwine among the twigs as to make escape impossible; he must have been hanging there in torture for a week by his look, but the shrike will not eat him till the last possible moment, unless so minded. And that poor lizard, again, with his wonderful tenacity of life; he may have been impaled for a fortnight, yet the skin on his ribs still rises and falls with a faint breathing action. More merciful than nature, we will put him out of his pain ”

“ The shrew-mouse has the same tastes as the mole: it is an ardent hunter of small game, a devourer of larvæ and insects, as you can see by its finely serrate teeth. Its slender body, made for squeezing into the smallest hole, and its long snout, shaped for prying into the narrowest crannies and crevices, enable it to go wherever vermin may be lurking. Woe to the wood-louse rolled up like a tiny pellet in some crack in the wall, and to the slug hiding under a stone! The shrew-mouse will have no difficulty in catching them, being so small that it could make its home in a nutshell. ”

“ Shrew (Soricidæ) , a family of insectivorous animals closely resembling, in general form and appearance, the true mice and dormice, but in reality widely differing from and not to be confused with those rodents. The shrews have the head small, muzzle long and pointed, eyes small but well developed, external ears usually small; body mouse-like, covered with hair; limbs short, nearly equal in size, the feet not adapted for digging; tail nearly naked and scaly. Along the sides of the body, or at the root of the tail, are peculiar glands, which secrete a fluid of a very strong odor. ”

“ There has been an unusual number of shrikes the past fall and winter; like the hawks, they follow in the wake of the little birds and prey upon them. Some seasons pass and I never see a shrike. This year I have seen at least a dozen while passing along the road. One day I saw one carrying its prey in its feet,—a performance which I supposed it incapable of, as it is not equipped for this business like a rapacious bird, but has feet like a robin. One wintry evening, near sunset, I saw one alight on the top of a tree by the roadside, with some small object in its beak. ”

“ As the weasel caught a whiff of the pungent, evil odor of the shrew’s fur, he drew aside, his lips curled back over his sharp teeth in a grimace of disgust, and the masked beastling passed unscathed. At a little cove by the edge of a stump, the shrew drank deep. The pointed snout had just come to the surface, when his quick hearing caught from overhead a tiny flutter of sound. Long ages of sudden death from the air for the shrew-folk made the next movement of this one automatic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Most species of shrews are smaller than any mice, with pointed noses, minute eyes, and small ears which are hidden in the fur. They are insect eaters and like any kind of fresh meat. They are active all winter.
66 The dusky shrew is a sepia brown in color and is found throughout most of the park area. Mountain water shrews make their homes in banks of icy streams and are mouse-size with upper parts slaty mixed with hoary. They have larger feet than the dusky shrew and have bristly fringes along the toes with partial webs which equip them for swimming readily. ”

“ Sitting hunched up on its platform, the head with its massive bulbous beak drawn against its arched back, the little thing is less like a bird than a mammal in appearance—a singularly coloured shrew, let us say. The colour is indeed strange, the whole body, the thick, fleshy, snout-like beak included, being a deep, intense, almost indigo blue, and the loose hair-like down on the head and upper parts a light, bright primrose yellow. ”

“ This strange track was that of the masked shrew, the smallest mammal in the world, a tiny, blind death, whose doom it is to devour its own weight in flesh and blood every twenty-four hours. Another track showed like a tunnel, with its concave surface stamped with zigzag paw-marks. It was the trail of the blarina shrew, which twisted here and there as if a snake had writhed its way through the powdered snow. Again, all other tracks radiated away from it; for the blarina is braver and bigger and fiercer than its little blood-brother, the masked shrew. ”

“ Every summer they increase sevenfold; but as autumn approaches, and food grows scarce, they die off in their thousands from cold and hunger, as I gather. So many of them then strew the footpaths in sandy districts that country people have a quaint superstition about them; they say a shrew cannot cross a church-path without dying instantly. What constitutes a church-path is somebody having once gone to church along it. The truth is, dead shrews abound equally in the grass and thickets; but, of course, only those are seen which happen to die in the open. ”

“ Meadow-mice, deer-mice, chipmunks, rats, rabbits, and even squirrels in their trees the slayer ran down to their death; for, unlike the shrews, a weasel kills from blood-lust and not from hunger.
Like some great inch-worm, the weasel looped its way along, until its path crossed that of the shrew pattering toward the brook. Even in the face of [Pg 145] this incarnate terror of the wild folk the little shrew showed all the stubborn courage of his race and, refusing to turn aside, passed within an inch of the deadly jaws of the red killer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The blue-blooded shrew is by no means uncommon. Watch one of this kind yelling on a racecourse in tearful and foul-mouthed rage and you will have a few queer thoughts about human nature. Then there is the ladylike shrew. Ah, that being! What has she to answer for? She is neat, low-spoken, precise; she can purr like a cat, and she has the feline scratch always ready too. Pity the governess, the servant, the poor flunkey whom she has at her mercy, for their bread is earned in bitterness. ”

“ In that very instant, while he was in the midst of this awkward effort to turn, the shrew fell upon him, gripping and tearing his soft, unprotected flank.
The mole was not altogether deficient in character; and he was larger and heavier than his assailant. Seeing that escape was impossible, and stung by the pain of his wounds, he flung himself with energy into the struggle, biting desperately and striving to bear down his lighter [Pg 162] opponent. It was a blind smother of a fight, there in that pitch-black narrow tunnel whose walls pressed ceaselessly upon it and hemmed it in. ”

“ Probably no mammal is more numerous in the eastern United States than the short-tailed shrew. It occurs everywhere—in forests, in 594 brushy areas, in old fields, and along grassy banks. Within the city of Washington it is common in Rock Creek Park, where it lives in covered runs which it makes among the grass and fallen leaves. These shrews drink frequently, and this may in part account for their abundance near streams or other water, although it may be the desirable moist soil conditions which draw them to such situations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What he expected to find in the burrow which he entered so confidently was a satisfying meal, followed by a long, safe sleep.
As he trailed along the windings of the tunnel his motion made a faint, dry, whispering sound, which, with his peculiar, sickly, elusive scent, travelled just before him, and reached the doorway of the little chamber where the shrew was dozing. The sleeper was wide awake at once. Instantly, too, he understood the whole peril. To do him justice, it was not flight he thought of, but fight. ”

“ The shrew who shrieks at a drunkard only makes him dive further into the gulf in search of oblivion; the shrew who snaps constantly at a servant makes the girl dull, fierce, and probably wicked; the shrew who tortures a patient man ends by making him desperate and morose; the shrew who weeps continually out of spite, and hopes to earn pity or attention in that fashion, ends by being despised by men and women, abhorred by children, and left in the region of entire neglect. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”