If the forest floor was covered with snow when Captain John Smith was led a captive across the Northern Neck in the winter of 1607, it is probable that he saw snowshoe rabbits scampering about between the big trees. Porcupines lived there too, and wild-cats, pole-cats and a marten known as "black fox." The little animal he saw with the spotted coat, like the skin of a fawn, was a ground squirrel. John Smith saw the flying squirrel and the opossum for he describes them: "A small beast they haue ... we call them flying squirrels, because spreading their legs, and so stretching the largeness of their skins, that they have bin seene to fly 30 or 40 yards. An opassom hath an head like a Swine, and a taile like a Rat, and is the bigness of a Cat." Ordinary squirrels, rabbits, foxes and "Rackoones" were abundant. Captain John Smith no doubt saw beaver at work when they crossed the many streams. "The Beaver," he wrote, "is as bigge as an ordinary water dogge ... His taile somewhat like ... a Racket, bare without haire." The procession of Indians and the lone white man may have come upon a herd of heavy, slow-moving "Kine." (These were buffalo but are believed to have lacked the hump.) They were not as wild as the other animals of the wilderness. Perhaps Smith caught glimpses of the elk that roamed the forest. At night John Smith heard the sounds of many wild beasts. The wolves were small but numerous and ravenous. In the evening they hunted like a pack of beagle hounds. If the procession happened to be encamped near the head of a river he probably heard before morning the scream of a panther as he stalked his prey. But of all the animals in the Tidewater region at that time, Smith says "Of beastes the chiefe are Deare." The Northern Neck had been hunted less by the Indians than the lower peninsulas, and it was teeming with wildlife. The primeval forest furnished home and food for the "wild beastes." "_BIRDS TO VS UNKNOWNE_" When John Smith traveled across the Northern Neck, from the Rappahannock to the Potomac, in the winter of 1607, he probably saw many birds, for this was their season. "In winter," he wrote, "there are great plenty of Swans, Craynes gray and white with blacke wings, Herons, Geese, Brants, Ducke, Wigeon, Dotterell, Oxeies, Parrots, and Pigeons. Of all those sorts great abundance, and some other strange kinds, to vs unknowne by name. But in sommer not any, or a very few to be seene." For ages wildfowl had been multiplying with little to hinder them. The Indians killed only what they needed and their weapons were too primitive to make an impression on the great flocks of waterfowl that came to the rivers and marshes to feed on the heavy growth of wild celery, oats and other aquatic plants. In early winter when these fowl gathered in their annual migration from the North the sky, it was said, was darkened with them as they arose and descended from their feeding grounds in the marshes lying along shore.