The Weasel a Clever Dodger

1895

One That Was Quicker Than the Shot of a Sportsman's Trusty Gun.

"Coming to our camp in the cool October evening after throwing our lines for bass at sunset in Little Bear pond," said the Gotham sportsman, "we found that a visitor had been there during our absence. We had taken up our quarters in a deserted shingle camp, a low log structure with a splint root. A 'deacon's seat' stood before the open fireplace of stone, and behind, laid thatchwise on the ground, were the pine boughs upon which we were to sleep. We had left our dunnage there earlier in the day and had hung up upon a peg in the wall two partridges that we had shot. After we had lighted up the place with a glowing fire we saw that the partridges were gone from the wooden peg on which they had hung and were nowhere to be seen. A long search about the camp revealed them at last on the opposite side, crowded half under the bottom log of the wall, as if an attempt had been made to get them out of the camp that way.

"We hung them up again upon the peg and in a few minutes discovered a weasel running about them trying to get them down again. He appeared to be regardless of our presence. He would run out to the end of the peg and work away awhile to try to push the string that held them over the end and then would dart to the ground below and sit upright, looking at them, his eyes all the while glowing like emeralds. At last I picked my gun up, loaded with heavy charges of birdshot.

"'It's no use trying to hit him,' said Farris, my companion, an old woodsman. 'He'll dodge the flash of your gun. The most you can do is to scare him away.'

"As the weasel sat upright and motionless on one of the bottom logs of the camp I took a careful sight and fired with my right barrel at him. The smoke cleared away, but no weasel was to be seen, although the place where he had sat was peppered with fine holes where the shot had all struck within a space as large as the palm of my hand. If the weasel had been hit, he would have been found, and he had evidently dodged at the flash of the explosion or perhaps the fall of the hammer. But the shot had the effect of frightening him away, for we had no more visit from him during our stay." — New York Sun.