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Show quisitive, and you never can tell what a cat will do. And skunks in search of food will march boldly Into the house if a door is left open a crack. A family of skunks camped for a week in the summer kitchen of one of our neighbors. Nobody dared to disturb them. They stuck around until the first frost, then went off into the woods. I know people who claim to have made pets of skunks. They are odorless when not irritated. Trouble is, you never know what will irritate a skunk. RODAVI TOMORROW II FRANK PARKER I! I Istojsk: BjyUEJ54 j SKUNKS .... unassailable ' The night of the July full moon our 'phone rang. A neighbor across the village street was calling to tell us that a family of skunks had Just come through our fence into our front yard. If you live In a New England country town you can expect mother skunks to come out on summer moonlight nights teaching their kittens to forage for food. We took great pains not to annoy these visitors. We brought the garbage can inside, saw to it that our night-prowling tomcat was . safely locked in the woodshed, wood-shed, and called our next-door neighbors to be sure their collio pup was penned up. Experienced dogs never bother bo-ther skunks a second time, but pups are apt to be in- FOXES retrievers A few miles from our house is a popular golf course. This summer, sum-mer, from the opening of the season, sea-son, players have been complaining complain-ing about the disappearance of balls driven from the seventh tee. Although the balls went straight down the fairway, over a little hill, they often seemed to vanish in thin air. A couple of weeks ago the mystery was solved. A sharp-eyed sharp-eyed caddy saw a little red fox dash out of the rough undergrowth, un-dergrowth, snatch up a ball that had just dropped on the green, and dash back into the . brush with it. An impromptu fox hunt, minus hounds, horns and horses, was organized, or-ganized, and the burrow of the fox was found, with a hundred or more balls in the hole. The fox got away. About the only foxes we see in New England now are the little red English ones. The native American Am-erican fox is the larger grey fellow. fel-low. He doesn't dig a hole to live in, but makes a nest among the rocks. A couple of hundred years ago some sporting colonial gentleman gentle-man imported some red foxes and turned them loose on Long Island. I don't know how far west they've spread, but I'm told they're to be found everywhere east of the Mississippi. while the man passed the hat. One night the bear got loose, and all the men and boys of the village turned out to hunt for it. Three days later some of them came across the bear, in a clearing in the woods, all alone. He was going through nil of his tricks, then looking for someone to feed him. He knew no other way of life. Over in Bear Mountain Park last month the keeper of the menagerie men-agerie turned a gray fox loose. The poor creature had lived in a cage, among people, since he was born. Instead of running away, he hung around begging for food. Now he has become the pet of all the visitors and his living is assured. CAGES .... envirmonment I don't like to see wild animals caged in zoos or menageries, just for people to look at; though I suppose a good many of them are better off properly fed and cared for than they would be in their native country. To turn a caged animal loose, however, when it knows no other way of life than that of captivity, seems to me the height of cruelty. A few years ago a man came through, our north country coun-try leading a chained black bear. He had taught the bear many" tricks, which he performed per-formed in country towns MICE penned Last winter, as everybody knows, was one of the most severe se-vere in years. In the northeastern states snow began to fall early, temperatures dropped and the snow had no chance to melt before be-fore another snowstorm. One result re-sult of that severe winter is that j I have seen more loads of fine red clover hay being hauled along, our roads than in years. A good clover crop meflns that most of the field mice were killed off the previous wrlnter. Field mice have to get to the surface of the snow to find their winter food. They die when penned under a hard crust. After the snow ' goes, the field mice raid the bumblebees nests and kill off the larvae. That reduces the number of bumblebees in the region for that summer. Now, red clover come to maturity ma-turity by the am of the humble-bee, humble-bee, which in its search for honey carries the pollen from blossom to blossom. No field mice, no bumblebees; bum-blebees; no bumblebees, no red clover. That, at least, is what the farmers up our way say. RABBITS . . .( . . . hardy It is a perpetual marvel to me how most of the ; common wild things- get through our hard northern winters. The ordinary cotton-Tail hare which we call a rabbit is about as feeble a beast as there is, yet I seem to have seen as many young ones of the species this year as ever. I can understand the real rabbits, the English kind, get-ling get-ling through the winter, because be-cause they dig themselves burrows, the way our wood-chucks wood-chucks do. Hut "Molly Cot-ton(jiil" Cot-ton(jiil" just makes a nest in the biLshes, with somo grass, and somehow survives. The toughest wild beast we have in northeast United States now is the wildcat. State and county coun-ty pay a bonus for killing them, and one of my neighbors bagged twelve last year. 'Coon hunters shun them, for a wildcat will kill a 'coon dog with one slash. "The future of an individual, a family, a business, a nation, is built on faith. Since today's present pres-ent was yesterduy's future, it, too, has been built on faith, on the1 faitti of men and women in themselves, them-selves, in their associates, in their country and Its institutions. We need more faith in those around us,, in the business organizations which create profitable employment employ-ment for us, in the country which is still the world's greatest land of opportunity, but above all else, we need a renewed fuith in our-1 selves. It Ih only Insofar as we have faith in ourHolves that we can be creators and not dostroy-ers dostroy-ers of prosperity." Jumes F. Boll, ' chairman, General Mills, Inc. |