ng, I had taken it as a matter of course that we should
somehow all make our winter homes together. But when that morning he
started out, with mother after him, and I attempted to follow, he drove
me away. I followed yet for a while, but he kept turning back and
growling at me, and at last told me bluntly that I must go and shift for
myself. I took it philosophically, I think, but it was with a heavy
heart that I turned away to seek a winter home for myself.

It did not take me long to decide on the spot. At the head of a narrow
gully, where at some time or other a stream must have run, there was a
tree half fallen, and leaning against the hillside. A little digging
behind the tree would make as snug and sheltered a den as I could want.
So I set to work, and in the course of a few hours I had made a
sufficiently large hollow, and into it I scraped all the leaves and
pine-needles in the neighborhood, and, by working about inside and
turning round and round, I piled them up on all sides until I had a nest
where I was perfectly sheltered, with only an opening in front large
enough to go in and out of. This opening I would almost close when the
time came, but for the present I left it open and lived inside, sleeping
much of the time, but still continuing for a week or ten days to go out
in the mornings and evenings for food. But it was getting colder and
colder, and the woods had become strangely silent. The deer had gone
down to the lower ground at the first sign of coming winter, and the
coyotes and the wolves had followed to spend the cold months in the
foot-hills and on the plains about the haunts of man. The woodchucks
were already asleep below-ground, and of the birds only the woodpeckers
and the crossbills, and some smaller birds fluttering among the
pine-branches, remained. There was a fringe of ice along the edges of
the streams, and the kingfishers and the ospreys had both flown to where
the waters would remain open throughout the year. The beavers had been
very busy for some time, but now, if one went to the nearest dam in the
evening, there was not a sign of life.

At last the winter came. It had been very cold and gray for a day or
two, and I felt dull and torpid. And then, one morning towards mid-day,
the white flakes began to fall. There had been a few little flurries of
snow before, lasting only for a minute or two; but this was different.
The great flakes fell slowly and softly, and soon the whole landscape