I reached in as far as my arm would go, and drew out a fistful of pop-corn cobs. So here was part of my scanty crop! I pushed in again, and gathered up a bunch of chestnut shells, hickory-nuts, and several neatly rifled hazelnuts. This was story enough. There was a nest, or family, of mice living under the slashing pile, who for some good reason kept their stores here in the recesses of this ancient red oak. Or was this some squirrel’s barn being pilfered by the mice, as my barn is the year round? It was not all plain. But this question, this constant riddle of the woods,--small, indeed, in the case of the mouse, and involving no great fate in its solution,--is part of our constant joy in the woods. Life is always new, always strange, always fascinating. It has all been studied and classified according to species. Any one knowing the woods at all would know that these were mice-tracks, the tracks of the white-footed mouse, even, and not the tracks of the jumping mouse, the house mouse, or the meadow mouse. But what is the whole small story of these prints? What purpose, intention, feeling do they spell? What and why?--a hundred times! But the scientific books are dumb. Indeed, they do not consider such questions worth answering, just as under the species _Mus_ they make no record of the fact that The present only toucheth thee. But that is a poem. Burns discovered that--Burns, the farmer! The woods and fields are poem-full, and it is largely because we do not know, and never can know, just all that the tiny snow-prints of a wood-mouse may mean, nor understand just what root and all, and all in all, the humblest flower is. The pop-corn cobs, however, were a known quantity, a tangible fact, and falling in with a gray squirrel’s track not far from the red oak, we went on, our game-bag heavier, our hearts lighter at the thought that we, by the sweat of our brow, had contributed a few ears of corn to the comfort of this snowy winter world. The squirrel’s track wound up and down the hillside, wove in and out and round and round, hitting every possible tree, as if the only road for a squirrel was one that looped and doubled and tied up every stump and zigzagged into every tree trunk in the woods. But all this maze was no ordinary journey. The squirrel had not run this coil of a road for breakfast, because when he travels, say, for distant nuts, he goes as directly as you go to your school or office; but he goes not by streets, but by trees, never crossing more of the open in a single rush than the space between him and the nearest tree that will take him on his way. What interested us here in the woods was the fact that a second series of tracks just like the first, only about half as large, dogged the larger tracks persistently, leaping tree for tree, and landing track for track with astonishing accuracy--tracks which, had they not been evidently those of a smaller squirrel, would have read to us most menacingly.