Returning to the wood-road--on that morning, among the trails of the deer-mice were the more numerous tracks of the meadow- or field-mouse. They show no tail-mark, and the smaller footprints were not side by side as with the deer-mice, but almost always one behind the other. These smaller paw-marks among all jumping-animals, such as rabbits, squirrels, and mice, are always the marks of the fore-paws. The larger far-apart tracks mark where the hind feet of the jumper come down in front and outside of the fore-paws as he jumps.
On that day, among the mouse-tracks on the snow there showed another faint trail, which looked like a string of tiny exclamation marks with a tail-mark between them. It was the track of the masked shrew, the smallest mammal of the Eastern states. This tiny fierce fragment of flesh and blood is only about the length of a man's little finger. So swift are the functions of its wee body that, deprived of food for six hours, the shrew starves and dies. 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 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. The mouse bites. The shrew eats. Boring in, the shrew secures a grip with its long, crooked, crocodile jaws filled with fierce teeth, and devours its way like fire through skin and flesh and bone, worrying out and swallowing mouthfuls of blood and flesh until the mouse falls over dead. This tiny beastling, the masked shrew, must be weighed by troy weight, and tips a jeweler's scale at less than forty-five grains.
To-day the snow said the shrew had been an unbidden and unwelcome guest at the mice-dinner. At first the mice-trails were massed together in a maze of tracks. Where the trail of the shrew touched the circle, there shot out separate lines of mice-tracks, like the spokes of a wheel, with the paw-marks far apart, showing that the guests had all sprung up from the laden table of the snow and dashed off in different directions. The shrew-track circled faintly here and there, ran for some distance in a long straight trail, and--stopped. The Sword of Damocles, which hangs forever over the head of all the little wild-folk, had fallen. The shrew was gone. A tiny fleck of blood and a single track like a great X on the snow told the tale of his passing. All his fierceness and courage availed nothing when the great talons of the flying death clamped through his soft fur. X is the signature of the owl-folk just as K is of the hawk-kind. The size of the mark in this case showed that the killer was one of the larger owls. Later in the winter it might have been the grim white Arctic owl, which sometimes comes down from the frozen North in very cold weather. So early in the season, however, it would be either the barred or the great horned owl.