Amid all the desolation of their woodland haunts the squirrels chatter their delight in windless days of sunshine, and scoff at biting cold and wintry blasts. The nuthatch winds his tiny trumpet, the titmouse pipes his cheery note, the jay tries the innumerable tricks of his unmusical voice, and from their rollicking flight athwart the wavering slant of snowflakes drifts the creaking twitter of buntings. The sharp, resonant strokes of the woodman's axe and the groaning downfall of the monarchs that it lays low, the shouts of teamsters, the occasional report of a gun, the various sounds of distant farmstead life, the jangle of sleigh bells on far-off highways, the rumbling roar of a railroad train rushing and panting along its iron path, and the bellowing of its far-echoed signals, all proclaim how busily affairs of life and pleasure still go on while the summer-wearied earth lies wrapped in her winter sleep. Night, stealing upon her in dusky pallor, under cloudy skies, or silvering her face with moonbeams and starlight, brings other and wilder voices. Solemnly the unearthly trumpet of the owl resounds from his woodland hermitage, the fox's gasping bark, wild and uncanny, marks at intervals his wayward course across the frozen fields on some errand of love or freebooting, and, swelling and falling with puff and lapse of the night wind, as mournful and lonesome as the voice of a vagrant spirit, comes from the mountain ridges the baying of a hound, hunting alone and unheeded, while his master basks in the comfort of his fireside. XLVI THE VARYING HARE It is wonderful that with such a host of enemies to maintain himself against, the varying hare may still be counted as one of our familiar acquaintances. Except in the depths of the great wildernesses, he has no longer to fear the wolf, the wolverine, the panther, and the lesser _felidæ_, but where the younger woodlands have become his congenial home, they are also the home of a multitude of relentless enemies. The hawk, whose keen eyes pierce the leafy roof of the woods, wheels above him as he crouches in his form. When he goes abroad under the moon and stars, the terrible shadow of the horned owl falls upon his path, and the fox lurks beside it to waylay him, and the clumsy raccoon, waddling home from a cornfield revel, may blunder upon the timid wayfarer. But of all his enemies none is more inveterate than man, though he is not, as are the others, impelled by necessity, but only by that savagery, the survival of barbarism, which we dignify by the name of the sporting instinct.