The squirrel is an industrious and sagacious animal. He lays up stores of provisions for future use, and conceals them where others of his kind are unable to find them. And his memory is so perfect, and location of place so unerring, that in dead of winter, and short of a meal, he will quit his warm nest in the hollow limb of some tree, plunge into deep snow and go direct a long distance to the exact spot where months before he had buried a walnut or an acorn, and dig down and get the treasure and return with it to his home. [Illustration: The Squirrel Hunter.] It was once said, “To number the Bison would be like counting the leaves of the forest”--so, too, the myriads of squirrels that inhabited the unbroken forests of Ohio evidently approached in number the incalculable hosts of buffalo that in the grandeur of their numerical strength swept over the western plains. The rabbit multiplies six times as fast as the squirrel, yet he has never appeared in such multitudes as that of his bushy-tailed cousin. Happen what may he is, however, always on hand. He loves civilization and prefers the grassy fields, standing corn and sunny hillsides to the wilds of the forests, and is always as ready to care for the waste apples in the orchard as he is to bark around the young trees. He is an annoying tenant--timid by nature and easily captured. Millions are sold in the markets every year, but can not come up in numbers with the squirrel in his palmy days. The “one day’s rabbit shooting” at Lamar, Colo., by two hundred guns, December 31, 1894, resulted in the capture of five thousand one hundred and forty-two (5,142); but compared with a squirrel hunt in Franklin county, Ohio, August 20, 1822, it does not appear so large; when a less number of guns killed nineteen thousand six hundred and sixty; and evidently not a “very good day for squirrels to be out either.” No part of the North-west, in a state of nature, was so well adapted to the propagation and preservation of game beasts and birds as that within the geographical limits of Ohio. To show the immense amount of large game which also existed long after settlements had been made, it is but necessary to give the results of a single day’s hunt, confined to one township of five miles square, in the county of Medina, December 24, 1818, and which is authentically described by Henry Howe in his “Historical Collections of Ohio,” Vol. II, pages 463 to 467, inclusive: “The accurate enumeration of the game killed at the center (of the drive) resulted as follows: _Seventeen_ wolves, _twenty-one_ bears, _three hundred_ deer, besides _turkeys_, _coons_ and _foxes_ not counted.” The wolf-scalps were good for fifteen dollars each, making a draw on the treasury for two hundred and fifty-five dollars. Many counties in Ohio were not formed nor settled for nearly a quarter of a century after becoming part of the state, and a few much later, the last being that of Noble, in 1851, making in all eighty-eight counties.