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“If we consider the animal creation on a broad scale, the aggregate of living beings will be found to be the devourers and destroyers of others.” The editor of Cassel’s Natural History is responsible for this statement, and it struck me as a forcible and appropriate one for this chapter on weasels, etc. Without doubt the weasel, next to the rat, is one of the most destructive of our vermin, preying as it does with extraordinary ferocity on leverets, chicken, young ducks, pigeons, rabbits, in fact, on all creatures more timorous than itself. Truly it is not a very formidable enemy to the farmer in connection with his granaries and other stores, for it is an inveterate slayer of ruts and mice, but the gamekeeper cannot tolerate it. Its “treasons, stratagems and spoils” are, without exception, excessive above all other of the spoiling mammalia whatsoever.

Perhaps you doubt the conclusions to which I arrive in reference to this pretty, brown-backed white-bodied little animal, and there are some naturalists whose writings seem to clothe it with very different characteristics. A certain Mademoiselle de Laistre seems to contradict, in one of her letters, the commonly received opinion that it cannot be domesticated. She describes with touching minuteness how her weasel would drink milk out of her hands and fondle with her, showing signs of satisfaction and enjoyment, which could scarcely be apart from intelligence. “The little creature,” she says, “can distinguish my voice amid twenty others, and springs over every one in the room till it finds me. Nothing can exceed the lively and pleasing way it caresses me with its two little paws; it frequently pats me on the chin in a manner that expresses the utmost fondness. This, with a thousand other kindnesses, convinces me of the sincerity of its attachment. He is quite aware of my intention when dressed to go out, and then it is with much difficulty I can rid myself of him. On these occasions he will conceal himself behind a cabinet near the door and spring on me as I pass with astonishing quickness.”

This testimony would seem to rather invest mustela vulgaris with domestic virtues at least rare in his family, and, sooth to say, there is a vast crowd of witnesses waiting to be heard, whose report of his character is far different. The weasel, agile and lithe as he is, is ferocious to the degree which scorns fear, and there are many instances wherein he has attacked the absolute viceroy of creation—man.

I recollect once chasing a weasel with some determination and finding myself suddenly confronted by some seven or eight others, who ran up my legs and endeavored to reach my face. Fortunately I beat them off and killed seven with the stick I carried, but I feel satisfied I should not have escaped so well if I had not stood my ground and luckily possessed a stick.

I have frequently heard of similar experiences, and one I find is recorded in a cutting from a Scotch newspaper in my scrap-book.

One night, it appears, the father of Captain Brown, the naturalist, was returning from Gilmerton, near Edinburgh, by the Dalkeith road. He observed on the high ground at a considerable distance betwixt him and Craigmillar Castle a man who was leaping about performing a number of antic gestures more like those of a madman than of a sane person. After contemplating this apparently absurd conduct, he thought it might be some unfortunate maniac, and, climbing over the walls, made directly towards him. When he got pretty near he saw that the man had been attacked, and was defending himself against the assaults of a number of small animals which he at first took for rats, but which, in fact, turned out on getting closer, to be a colony of from fifteen to twenty weasels, which the unfortunate man was tearing from him and endeavoring to keep from his throat. Had he not been a powerful man, capable of sustaining the extreme fatigue of this singular exertion, he probably would have succumbed to the repeated efforts made by the ferocious little creatures to get at his throat. As it was, his hands were much bitten, and bleeding profusely.

It further appears that the commencement of the battle was nearly as follows. He was walking slowly through the park when he happened to see a weasel. He ran at it, and made several unsuccessful attempts to strike it with a small cane he held in his hand. On coming near the rock, he got between it and the animal, and thus cut off retreat. The weasel squeaked out aloud, when a sortie of the whole colony was made, and the affray commenced.

Apropos of this, I have read somewhere of a colony of rats attacking a condemned criminal in the sewers of Paris—or in a dungeon closely contiguous—and I can quite believe that hunger and numbers would render these horrible vermin capable of homicide.

I do not quite see how any one can pity the members of this weasel family. Let any one of my boy readers hear the agonized cries of a pursued rabbit as it finds its relentless foe chasing it with a determination and persistence quite unequaled, and he will probably find the American love of fair play prompt him to take the weaker creature’s part.

Emphatically I declare it—a weasel never relinquishes its quarry till the life’s blood has been sucked and the brain extracted and eaten. Then wasteful as the little tyrant is, the rats may have the remainder, whilst it seeks for more prey. Its little finger-thick body and black, venom-leaden eyes seem the incarnation of destructiveness, whilst over the sharp incisive teeth rows might well be written

“Ch’entrate lasciate ogni speranza,”

the terrible epigraph Dante, in his wonderful “Divina Commedia,” saw inscribed over the portals of the infernal regions.

Perhaps there is one redeeming feature in all this pitiless ferocity, and that is the indomitable courage with which the weasel defends its young against all marauders. It breeds as fast as a rabbit—that is, two or three, or even more times in a year—and its nest of dried herbage and undergrowth is generally made in the hollow of some old tree or wall. Close by the nest may often be found the remains of putrid mice, rats, birds, etc., which circumstance has suggested to some naturalists the conclusion that the weasel prefers carrion to fresh food. This is erroneous. It is true that it hunts, like some dogs, entirely, or nearly so, by scent, and will even follow the sightless mole through the interminable windings of its burrow; but fresh flesh and blood are its delight, and if there be a plentitude of food it disdains all the grosser parts of its prey with a fastidiousness worthy of Apicius, the gourmet. The weasel generally produces five or six young ones at a birth.

Fig. 11.

I do not counsel sparing the weasel any more than the rat. The best place for the gins to be set is underneath a wall whereby the weasel is known to travel. The best trap unquestionably is the steel trap, or gin, and the best bait is the inside of a newly-killed rabbit. This is the concrete essence of my experience. You can scent the bait with musk, and this addition will often prove of exceeding service. At the ends of drains, in the hollows of old buildings, in the dry tracts of ditches, by old trees—all these are likely places and a careful watch will often discover their tracks. In setting the gin do not allow it to spring hard as if you expected an elephant of the Jumbo type to tread on the plate. On the contrary, let it spring very lightly, and if possible hang the bait up, so that the creature puts a foot on the plate and so gets caught. A very good sort of trap for open places is a fall-trap, which may be made at home and is useful for nearly all kinds of vermin, including even birds (See Fig. 11). Some little explanation is needed for the complete understanding of this trap. A is a board hollowed near the letter A to relieve e when the trap falls. B is a slab of lead or iron cut to admit a and f; h is a hinge holding c, which, when adjusted at g, impinges on a, and so sustains the slab B. On the little hooks d the bait is fixed, and the weasel confidently places his foot on e. Of course f then springs from g and down falls the slab, crushing the captive instantly. A stone slab is quite as useful, if not more so, than lead or iron, and it is evident that this fall-trap can be set with the greatest ease and delicacy.

Fig. 12.

The next useful trap is termed “The Fig. 4 Trap,” from its resemblance to that character, and is shown in the engraving (Fig. 12). This consists of a large slab of stone, metal, or wood, propped up by three pieces of wood (A, B and C). If the engraving be carefully examined it will be seen to consist of a perpendicular A, of a horizontal bar C, at one end of which is attached the bait D, and of a slanting stick B. The upright A is usually half an inch square, and cut to a sort of chisel-shape at top; a notch is also cut in the side of the stretcher C, as shown in the side diagram x, to prevent it slipping down; and a notch is also cut at the top of B to receive the upright, as well as in C, to fix it, B being at this latter point of a chisel shape. It will be obvious to the attentive reader that if this trap be set carefully, and with a sufficiency of delicacy, a very slight tug at D will be sufficient to bring down the slab, crushing the animal, or, if a hollow be made in the ground, imprisoning it. This trap, for nearly all vermin (of course, except moles), is very cheap and effective; and for cats—in their wrong places, of course—is remarkably useful, especially if D represent a sponge, on which tincture of valerian or oil of rhodium has been sprinkled. One advantage of this trap is that it is inexpensive, and not likely to be coveted by anybody else. The gin has, however, preference in my mind over other artificial traps for weasels, and I counsel all my readers to adopt it as the surest if their pockets will sustain the initial expense. There is, however, nothing lost in endeavoring to make your own traps, for such perseverance implies interest in the pursuit of trapping, and this necessarily is the central motive towards the acquirement of natural knowledge.

There is one method of capturing weasels which I have found very useful, though it entails the loss of an innocent live bird in many cases. Form a sort of oblong square with brushwood and close it all in except two narrow lanes leading to the center, at which point peg down a young chicken or bird. Set the traps, as closely concealed as possible at the ends of these lanes, so that neither by ingress nor egress can the weasel escape without the chance of being caught. Each trap should be set very lightly, and in some dry ditch near a covert, or by the side of a wall, or, in fact, in any likely spot recognized by the trained eye.

Here is another bad character in the polecat, or foumart, and as it is the largest of the two, it commonly does most damage, though in saying this I really am not sure I can place either or them first in this respect. The weasel and polecat are unmitigated robbers and assassins, and according to opportunity are given indifferently to bad habits of the worst character. The polecat is, however, nearly sixteen inches from that to eighteen inches in length, and its bite is terrific and sometimes poisonous. Beware, therefore, of it when releasing one caught in a trap; in fact, as I before impressed on you, “kill it first.” The body of the polecat has a woolly undercoat of pale yellow, while the longer hairs are of a deep glossy brown.

Its habits are very similar to those of the weasel, and it commonly kills chickens by biting the head off and then sucking the blood, leaving perhaps a dozen bodies as mementoes of its visitation. I have known it to catch fish, and I caught one in a trap, set as I supposed at the time, for an otter. The otter turned out to be a polecat, however, which measured, exclusive of the tail, fourteen inches. Eels seemed to be the prey for which it took water, as I had previously found the remains of several half-eaten on the shore.

This circumstance was a strange one to me, and altogether exceptional, until I looked up my natural history books, when I found that Bewick refers to a similar fact in his “Quadrupeds.” He says:—“During a severe storm one of these animals was traced in the snow from the side of a rivulet to its hole at some distance from it.... Its hole was examined, the foumart taken, and eleven fine eels were discovered as the fruits of its nocturnal exertions. The marks on the snow were found to have been made by the motions of the eels while in the creature’s mouth.” We have no reason for doubting Bewick, but it is certain that the polecat must have extracted the eels from either beneath stones or mud, where, during cold weather such as described, it is their infallible habit to retire in a semi-torpid condition.

In trapping it use a strong gin, and set very lightly. The baits are precisely similar to those for the weasel. Be, above all, careful to use the naked hands as little as possible.