I really cannot tell how he contrived to free himself, or why he is not in that tree to this day. The squirrel is.
In a region where the cornfields and wheat-fields were often fifty and sixty acres in extent there was a plenty of quail, but I remember again but one victim to my gun. We set figure-four traps to catch them; but they were shrewder arithmeticians than we, and solved these problems without harm to themselves. After they began to mate, and the air was full of their soft, amorous whistling, we searched to find their nests, and had better luck, though we were forbidden to rob the nests when we found them; and in June, when the pretty little mother strutted across the lanes at the head of her tiny brood, we had to content ourselves with the near spectacle of her cunning counterfeit of disability at sight of us, fluttering and tumbling in the dust till her chicks could hide themselves. We had read of that trick, and were not deceived; but we were charmed just the same.
It is a trick that all birds know, and I had it played upon me by the mother snipe and mother wild-duck that haunted our dam, as well as by the quail. With the snipe, once, I had a fancy to see how far the mother would carry the ruse, and so ran after her; but in doing this I trod on one of her young--a soft, gray mite, not distinguishable from the gray pebbles where it ran. I took it tenderly up in my hand, and it is a pang to me yet to think how it gasped once and died. A boy is a strange mixture--as the man who comes after him is. I should not have minded knocking over that whole brood of snipes with my gun, if I could; but this poor little death was somehow very personal in its appeal.
I had no such regrets in respect to the young wild-ducks, which, indeed, I had no such grievous accident with. I left their mother to flounder and flutter away as she would; and took to the swamp where her young sought refuge from me. There I spent half a day wading about in waters that were often up to my waist, and full of ugly possibilities of mud-turtles and water-snakes, trying to put my hand on one of the ducklings. They rose everywhere else, and dived again after a breath of air; but at last one of them came up in my very grasp. It did not struggle, but how its wild heart bounded against my hand! I carried it home to show it and boast of my capture, and then I took it back to its native swamp. It dived instantly, and I hope it found its bereaved family somewhere under the water.