village of a dozen homes frozen in the ice and covered with snow. Mr. Sharp, a nature writer, says that you can skate all around them and sit on one to strap your skates, without bothering the furry bunch of sleepers inside. But push a stick carefully through the thick wall and you can hear a soft skurrying inside, then a "plunk, plunk, plunk!" as one after the other plunges into the water, through a doorway below the ice.
The muskrat doesn't mind. You couldn't wet his sleek, brown fur coat any more than you could wet a duck's feathers. He only sleeps in the daytime, in winter. Each stout dome has a single room. It is a sort of club house, or European hotel, where a number sleep in one bed, snuggled up to keep each other warm. At night they all tumble out into the icy water and hunt for food. They dive for fresh water mussels, and bite off tender white calamus blades. You know how good calamus is. They bring their food, up through a hole and wash it, just as the 'coons or washing-bears do. After this feast of a sort of oysters on the half-shell and celery, they often go up into orchards for frozen apples—fruit ice. A dainty feeder is the muskrat.
The muskrat builds his house only for a winter sleeping place. In the summer he burrows in the bank or builds under bushes on the swamp. Mr. Burroughs says he is a fine weather prophet. It he begins to build by October—and he works only at night—you may be sure there is to be a cold winter. Or, if he builds very high and strong, his house solidly plastered to logs, stumps or tussocks of grass, look out for high water.
A dark lantern, with which you can throw a light over a pond, will give you glimpses of muskrat families feeding. Only a foot long, their fur is so thick, rich and glossy a brown that it is sold as river mink. Muskrats sit up to eat, something like squirrels, or rather like kangaroos, using their six-inch, flat, scaly tails for third legs. They use those tails for rudders in swimming, too, and with them they slap the water to warn others of danger. Perhaps, who knows, they use them as beavers use their tails, for trowels in plastering their houses with mud. For his size the muskrat is just as bright and clever as his big cousin, the beaver.
Even where they are too quick, and you fail to see them, you can tell where muskrats have been by a faint musky odor, as of a flower perfume on the frosty, moonlit air of a lonely marsh.
