CHAPTER XIV.

A TALE OF A SQUIRREL AND THREE BLIND MICE.

"Andy, what is a shade-tail?"

We were encamped in an oak-forest on the eastern bank of the Rappahannock, late in the fall of 1863. We had built no winter-quarters yet, although the nights were growing rather frosty, and had to content ourselves with our little "dog-tents," as we called our shelters, some dozen or so of which now constituted our company row. I had just come in from a trip through the woods in quest of water at a spring near an old deserted log-house about a half-mile to the south of our camp, when, throwing down my heavy canteens, I made the above interrogatory of my chum.

Andy was lazily lying at full length on his back in the tent, reclining on a soft bed of pine-branches, or "Virginia feathers," as we called them, with his hands clasped behind his head, lustily singing--

"Tramp, tramp, tramp! the boys are marching! Cheer up, comrades, they will come! And beneath the starry flag We shall breathe the air again--"

"What's that?" asked he, ceasing his song before finishing the stanza, and rising up on his elbow.

"I asked whether you could tell me what a shade-tail is?"

"A shade-tail! Never heard of it before. Don't believe there is any such thing. I know what a buck-tail is, though. There's one," said he, pulling a fine specimen out from under his knapsack. "That just came in the mail while you were gone. The old buck that chased the flies with that brush for many a year was shot up among the Buffalo mountains last winter, and my father bought his tail of the man who killed him, and has sent it to me. It cost him just one dollar."

Buck-tails were in great demand with us in those days, and happy indeed was the man who could secure so fine a specimen as Andy now proudly held in his hand.

"But isn't it rather large?" inquired I. "And it's nearly all white, and would make an excellent mark for some Johnny to shoot at, eh?"

"Never you fear for that. 'Old Trusty' up there," said he, pointing to his gun hanging along underneath the ridge-pole of the tent,--"'Old Trusty' and I will take care of Johnny Reb."

"But, Andy," continued I, "you haven't answered my question yet. What is a shade-tail?"

"A shade-tail," said he, meditatively,--"how should I know? I know precious well what a _detail_ is, though; and I'm on one for to-morrow. We go across the river to throw up breastworks."

"I forgot," said I, "that you have not studied Greek to any extent yet. If you live to get home and go back to school again at the old Academy, and begin to dig Greek roots in earnest, you will find that a shade-tail is a--squirrel. For that is what the old Greeks called the bonny bush-tail. Because, don't you see, when a squirrel sits up on a tree with his tail turned up over his back, he makes a shade for himself with his tail, and sits, as it were, under the shadow of his own vine and fig-tree."

"Well," said Andy, "and what if he does? What's to hinder him?"

"Nothing," answered I, entering the tent and lying down beside him on the pile of Virginia feathers; "only I saw one out here in the woods as I came along, and I think I know where his nest is; and if you and I can catch him, or, what would be better still, if we can capture one of his young ones (if he has any), why we might tame him and keep him for a pet. I've often thought it would be a fine thing for us to have a pet of some kind or other. Over in the Second Division, there is one regiment that has a pet crow, and another has a kitten. They go with the men on all their marches, and they say that the kitten has actually been wounded in battle, and no doubt will be taken or sent up North some day and be a great curiosity. Now why couldn't we catch and tame a shade-tail?"

"Yes," said Andy, becoming a little interested; "he could be taught to perch on Pointer's buck-horns in camp, and could ride on your drum on the march."

Pointer, you must know, was the tallest man in the company, and therefore stood at the head of the line when the company was formed. When we enlisted, he brought with him a pair of deer-antlers as an appropriate symbol for a Buck-tail company,--no doubt with the intention of making both ends meet. Now the idea of having a live tame squirrel to perch on Pointer's buck-horns was a capital one indeed.

But as the first thing to be done in cooking a hare is to catch the hare, so we concluded that the first thing to be done in taming a squirrel was to catch the squirrel. This gave us a world of thought. It would not do to shoot him. We could not trap him. After discussing the merits of smoking him out of his hole, we determined at last to risk cutting down the tree in which he had his home, and trying to catch him in a bag.

That afternoon, when we thought he would likely be at home taking a nap, having provided ourselves with an axe, an old oat-bag, and a lot of tent rope, we cautiously proceeded to the old beech-tree on the outskirts of the camp, where our intended pet had his home.

"Now, you see, Andy," said I, pointing up to a crotch in the tree, "up there is his front door; there he goes out and comes in. My plan is this: one of us must climb the tree and tie the mouth of the bag over that hole somehow, and come down. Then we will cut the tree down, and when it falls, if old shade-tail is at home, like as not he'll run into the bag; and then, if we can be quick enough, we can tie a string around the bag, and there he is!"

Andy climbed the tree and tied the bag. After he had descended, we set vigorously to work at cutting down the beech. It took us about half an hour to make any serious inroad upon the tough trunk. But by and by we had the satisfaction of seeing the tree apparently shiver under our blows, and at last down it came with a crash.

We both ran toward the bag as fast as we could, ready to secure our prize; but we found, alas! that squirrels sometimes have two doors to their houses, and that while we had hoped to bag our bush-tail at the front door, he had merrily skipped out the back way. For scarcely had the tree reached the ground, when we both beheld our intended pet leaping out of the branches and running up a neighboring tree as fast as his legs could carry him.

"Plague take it!" said Andy, wiping the perspiration from his face, "what shall we do now? I guess you'd better run to camp and get a little salt to throw on his tail."

"Never mind," said I, "we'll get him yet, see if we don't. I see him up there behind that old dry limb peeping out at us--there he goes!"

Sure enough, there he did go, from tree-top to tree-top, "lickerty-skoot," as Andy afterward expressed it, and we after him, quite losing our heads, and shouting like Indians.

As ill luck would have it, our shade-tail was making straight for the camp, on the outskirts of which he was discovered by one of the men, who instantly gave the alarm--"A squirrel! a squirrel!" In a moment all the boys in camp not on duty came running pell-mell, Sergeant Kensill's black-and-tan terrier, Little Jim (of whom more anon), leading the way. I suppose there must have been about a hundred men together, and all yelling and shouting too, so that the poor squirrel checked his headlong course high up on the dead limb of a great old oak-tree. Then, forming a circle around the tree, with "Little Jim" in the midst, the boys began to shout and yell as when on the charge,--

"Yi-yi-yi! Yi-yi-yi!"

Whereat the poor squirrel was so terrified, that, leaping straight up and out from his perch into open space, in sheer affright and despair, down he came tumbling tail over head into the midst of the circle, which rapidly closed about him as he neared the ground. With yells and cheers that made the wood ring, a hundred hands were stretched out as if to catch him as he came down. But Little Jim beat them all. True to his terrier blood and training, he suddenly leaped up like a shot, seized the squirrel by the nape of the neck, gave him a few angry shakes, which ended his agony, and carried him off triumphantly in his mouth to the tent of his owner, Sergeant Kensill, of Company F.

That evening, as we sat in our tent eating our fried hard-tack, Andy remarked, while sipping his coffee from his black tin cup, that if buck-tails were as hard to catch as shade-tails, they were well worth a dollar apiece any day; and that he believed a crow, or one of those young pigs we found running wild in the woods when we came to that camp, or something of that sort, would make a better pet than a squirrel.

"Well," said I, "we caught those pigs, anyhow, didn't we? But didn't they squeal! Fortunately they were so much like oysters that they couldn't get away from us, and all found their way into our frying-pans at last."

"I fail to apprehend your meaning," said Andy, with mock gravity, setting down his black tin cup on the gum-blanket. "By what right or authority, sir, do you presume to tell me that a pig is like an oyster?"

"Why, don't you see? A pig is like an oyster _because he can't climb a tree_! And that's the reason why we caught him."

"Bah!" exclaimed Andy; "that's a miserable joke, that is."

"Yet you must admit that it is a most happy circumstance that a pig cannot climb a tree, or we should have missed more than one good meal of fresh pork. Yet although we failed to make a pet of the squirrel because he _could_ climb a tree, and of the pig because he _could not_, we shall make a pet of something or other yet. Of that I am certain."

It was some months later, and not until we were safely established in winter-quarters, that we finally succeeded in our purpose of having something to pet. I was over at Brigade headquarters one day, visiting a friend who had charge of several supply-wagons. Being present while he was engaged in overhauling his stores, I found in the bottom of a large box, in which blankets had been packed away, a whole family of mice. The father of the family promptly made his escape; the mother was killed in the capture, and one little fellow was so injured that he soon died; but the rest, three in number, I took out unhurt. As I laid them in the palm of my hand, they at once struck me as perfect little beauties. They were very young and quite small, being no larger than the end of my finger, with scarcely any fur on them, and their eyes quite shut. Putting them into my pocket and covering them with some cotton which my friend gave me, I started home with my prize. Stopping at the surgeon's quarters on reaching camp, I begged a large empty bottle (which I afterward found had been lately filled with pulverized gum arabic), and somewhere secured an old tin can of the same diameter as the bottle. Then I got a strong twine, went down to my tent, and asked Andy to help me make a cage for my pets, which with pride I took out of my pocket and set to crawling and nosing about on the warm blankets on the bunk.

"What are you going to do with that bottle?" inquired Andy.

"Going to cut it in two with this string," said I, holding up my piece of twine.

"Can't be done!" asserted he.

"Wait and see," answered I.

Procuring a mess-pan full of cold water, and placing it on the floor of the tent near the bunk on which we were sitting, I wound the twine once around the bottle a few inches from the bottom, in such a way that Andy could hold one end of the bottle and pull one end of the twine one way, while I held the other end of the bottle and pulled the other end of the twine the other way, thus causing the twine, by means of its rapid friction, to heat the bottle in a narrow, straight line all around. After sawing away in this style for several minutes, I suddenly plunged the bottle into the pan of cold water, when it at once snapped in two along the line where the twine had passed around it, and as clean and clear as if it had been cut by a diamond. Then, melting off the top of the old tin can by holding it in the fire, I fastened the body of the can on the lower end of the bottle. When finished, the whole arrangement looked like a large long bottle, the upper part of which was glass and the lower tin. In this way I accomplished the double purpose of providing my pets with a dark chamber and a well-lighted apartment, at the same time preventing them from running away. Placing some cotton on the inside of both can and bottle for a bed, and thrusting a small sponge moistened with sweetened water into the neck of the bottle, I then put my pets into their new home. Of course they could not see, for their eyes were not yet open; neither did they at first seem to know how to eat; but as necessity is the mother of invention with mice as well as with men, they soon learned to toddle forward to the neck of the bottle and suck their sweet sponge. In a short time they learned also to nibble at a bit of apple, and by and by could crunch their hard-tack like veritable veterans.

The bottle, as has already been said, had been filled with pulverized gum arabic. Some of this still adhering to the inside of the bottle, was gradually brushed off by their growing fur; and it was amusing to see the little things sit on their haunches and clean themselves of the sticky substance. Sometimes they would all three be busy at the same time, each at himself; and again two of them would take to licking the third, rubbing their little red noses all over him from head to tail in the most amusing way imaginable.

Gradually they grew very lively, and became quite tame, so that we could take them out of their house into our hands, and let them hunt about in our pockets for apple-seeds or pieces of hard-tack. We called them Jack, Jill, and Jenny, and they seemed to know their names. When let out of their cage occasionally for a romp on the blankets, they would climb over everything, running along the inner edge of the eave-boards and the ridge-pole, but never succeeded in getting away from us. It was a comical sight to see Little Jim come in to look at them. A mouse was almost the highest possible excitement to Jim; for a mouse was second cousin to a rat, no doubt, as Jim looked at matters; and just say "rats!" to Jim, if you wanted to see him jump! He would come in and look at our pets, turn his head from one side to the other, and wrinkle his brow, and whine and bark; but we were determined he should not kill our mousies as he had killed our shade-tail a few months before.

What to do with our pets when spring came on and winter-quarters were nearly at an end, we knew not. We could not take them along on the march, neither did we like to leave them behind; for it seemed cruel to leave Jack, Jill, and Jenny in the deserted and dismantled camp to go back to the barbarous habits of their ancestors. On consideration, therefore, we concluded to take them back to the wagon train and leave them with the wagoner, who, though at first he demurred to our proposal, at last consented to let us turn them loose among his oat-bags, where I doubt not they had a merry time indeed.