Now all the trapper has to do, is to procure a few female muskrats and squeeze the contents of a bag into a vial.
This will attract the male muskrats in large numbers, and if the traps are properly arranged, large numbers of them may be taken.
The muskrats were doing exactly as Andy had hoped they'd do and spreading out.
If Andy's fondest hopes were realized, and there were 200 muskrats in the swamp by spring, they would still represent no fortune.
Though they preferred peace, muskrats could fight savagely and they had the courage to fight.
He had hoped that, in time, his muskratswould come to know and learn to avoid land prowlers, such as foxes and bobcats.
Since his muskrats were safe beneath the ice, a routine patrol sufficed for the swamp.
This early in the season, Andy's muskrats must be the very lure that was attracting them.
Andy released his remaining pairs of muskrats at scattered points and returned the way he had come, to pick up the empty crates.
He set his traps at places which mink would investigate but muskrats were likely to avoid, and he baited each with a tiny bit of scent from the scent glands of mink trapped last year.
More muskrats had been lost and that he knew, but on the whole, they had done better than he thought they could.
A half hour later, they appeared with ten babies, and when Andy passed the sloughs inhabited by lone muskrats whose mates had been killed, he was amazed to find each of them with eight young.
Reaching home, Andy took his sixth and final pair of muskrats down to the watery slough in front of his house.
But ice-locked ponds and sloughs would protect the muskrats from almost everything.
I've stocked my swamp with muskrats and--" Andy told of the six pairs of muskrats he had planted in his swamp.
He heard the doe rise and begin to crop grass, birds crying in the swamp, the murmur of the wind, muskrats swimming in the slough, and he awakened to none of it because it was familiar.
Lacking the faintest notion that, however indirectly, he had saved this colony of muskrats for Andy, Frosty finished his fish and went to hunt gophers.
His progress was slow, as in a nightmare,--such a nightmare as must often come to muskrats if their small, careless brains know how to dream.
In the upper world the winter was a severe one, but of all its bitterness the muskrats knew nothing, save by the growing thickness of the ice that sheltered them.
So the muskrats had no dangerous enemies to mar their peace.
Another of the littlemuskrats encountered fate on the threshold of his existence, being snatched by the hungry jaws of a large pickerel, which darted upon him like lightning from under the covert of a lily-pad.
Other muskrats now appeared, the wander-spirit seizing them all at once; and the males had many fierce fights, which left their naked tails scarred and bleeding.
Beavers, martens, foxes, and muskratsare caught in numbers in the vicinity of this great body of water.
Numbers of muskrats frequent these streams; and we observed in the course of the morning many of their mud-houses rising in a conical form to the height of two or three feet above the grass of the swamps in which they were built.
Down on the lake the muskrats and beavers were at their work.
Sometimes these young Muskrats did snatch and quarrel, as on that night when fifteen of them went to visit their old home and all wanted to go in first.
He was like all other Muskrats in using a great deal of perfume, and it was not a pleasant kind, being so strong and musky.
The young Muskratswere rolling and tumbling in the moonlight and looking like furry brown balls.
The Muskrats were very popular, for they were kind neighbors and never stole their food from others.
The Muskrats were too proud to do so, the Minks were too wise to, and the smaller people who lived near did not want to offend the Muskratsby mentioning it.
It was a dull, cloudy day and a few of the Muskrats were out.
The other Muskrats talked and talked and talked with him, but it made no difference.
It is said that an impudent young Mouse did say something about it once when the Muskrats could overhear him and that not one of them ever spoke to him again.
The Muskrats were awake, but they had their big houses to eat and were not likely to trouble Mice and Squirrels.
And it was not strange that, after their people had lived there so long, the Muskrats should be fond of the marsh.
Don't you know that young Muskrats should be seen and not heard?
The Muskrats were the largest people there, and lived in the finest homes.
I remember a freshet once in the end of February that flooded Lupton’s Pond and drove the muskrats of the whole pond village to their ridgepoles, to the bushes, and to whatever wreckage the waters brought along.
The muskrats are making preparations, but not they alone.
This lodge of mymuskrats in the meadow makes a difference, I am sure, of at least ten degrees in the mean temperature of my winter.
Long before the muskrats began to build, even before the swallows commenced to flock, my chipmunks started their winter stores.
I have come out to the bend to watch the muskrats building, for that small mound up the ditch is not an old haycock, but a half-finished muskrat house.
For I share in the life of both houses; and not less in the life of the mud house of the meadow, because, instead of Swedes, they are muskrats who live there.
Winter is at hand: but we are prepared, the muskrats even better prepared than I, for theirs is an adequate house, planned perfectly.
The north wind may blow, but the muskrats are building; and it is by no means a cheerless prospect, this wood-and-meadow world of mine in the gray November light.
The Lay of the Land 200 [Illustration] I The Muskrats are Building WE have had a series of long, heavy rains, and water is standing over the swampy meadow.
In the depth of winter the muskrat houses are sought out and pierced with strong and sharp spears which transfix the muskrats and bring them out on the points.
Them Maumee River Muskratsare the durndest thieves in the brigade.
You remember how he cleaned out them Maumee Muskrats at chuck-a-luck last pay-day?
Muskrats must not be injured by shooting or spearing.
There are, say, muskrats and an occasional mink along the rivers and streams.
Muskrats are the greatest nuisance in ornamental grounds where there are large water features.
On the other hand muskrats are more plentiful and bring only about thirty cents.
Along the rivers the muskrats live in holes in the banks.
Many trappers cut the houses open and set the traps on the inside, but those who wish to keep the muskrats in the vicinity will not do this, because it destroys their homes and causes them to seek new shelter.
If the water is not yet iced over, the muskrats can be caught with the steel jaw-traps.
With muskrats the tail is cut away from the rest of the skin.
The author of "Wild Life Near Home" says that muskrats "will wash what they eat, whether washing is needed or not.
The muskrat builds its house instinctively, and all muskrats build alike.
The possums are inclined to club together whenever they can find stumps that are roomy enough; but the muskrats habitually live together through the winter.
At no time do all of the muskratsbuild winter houses.
The walls of the meadow ditches just under the dam are honeycombed with subterranean passages, in which many of the muskrats live the year round.
Unless roused by the sharp thrust of a spear, the muskrats will sleep till nightfall.
But there is larger game abroad than muskrats and possums.
But here in the tide-meadows, where the ditches are deep, the muskrats rear their families almost wholly in underground rooms.
Muskrats build houses, foxes have holes, and squirrels sleep in true nests; but of the birds it can be said, "they have not where to lay their heads.
I was not surprised, then, when one of the muskrats sleekly disappeared beneath the surface, and came up directly with a mussel.
And these animals are all harmful, the muskrats exceedingly so, where the meadows are made by dikes and embankments.
Judging from the washing disease which ailed two tame muskrats that I knew, it is perfectly safe to say that had these found clean bread and butter upon the plank, instead of muddy calamus, they would have scoured it just the same.
I knew that they were there, for I had cut my feet upon them; and the muskrats knew they were there, for they had had many a moonlight lunch of them.
Suddenly a boatman's horn was heard echoing from shore to shore, to give notice of his approach to the farmer's wife with whom he was to take his dinner, though in that place only muskrats and kingfishers seemed to hear.
It antedates the memory of the oldest inhabitants, and the muskrats were in all probability the first settlers themselves.
Muskrats repair and enlarge their huts in the fall, and perhaps subsequently gnaw out as much from the inside as they add to the exterior.
Their number does not seem to vary much from year to year, whereas muskrats are said to be very prolific.
Muskrats are the only animals that may, with reason, be taken during the first half of October and yet it is better to wait until general collections are good.
This shows that trappers are finding these traps good ones for other animals than skunks and muskrats for which they were especially designed.
Muskrats do not gnaw off their feet as some suppose.
He was about to go on with them, but when he saw the look of disappointment on the faces of the children he, with his usual thoughtful kindness, transferred the two beavers and the muskrats from his own canoe to one of the late arrivals.
There the children found a couple of beavers that had but lately been trapped, and a dozen or more muskrats that Souwanas had speared in the marshes.
Where the ground is favorable, the muskrats do not build these mound-like nests, but burrow into the bank a long distance, and establish their winter-quarters there.
I overheard some muskrats engaged in a very gentle and affectionate jabber beneath a rude pier of brush and earth upon which I was standing.
The winter had come to stay, and it waxed more and more severe, till the unprecedented cold of the last days of December must have astonished even the wise muskrats in their snug retreat.
If that feller I talked with, the one that hunts muskrats around here in the season, had been just half as smart as Paul, he never would a lost hisself in the swamps, and come near starving to death.
And I heard one man, who traps quite a lot of muskrats every winter, tell how he got lost in a part of the swamp once, and spent a couple of pretty tough days and nights wandering around, before he found his way out again.
Winter before last the marshes were frozen to the bottom, blockading the muskrats in their houses, where entire families perished miserably after being starved to cannibalism.
But muskrats are not infallible prophets, and sometimes suffer therefor in starvation or drowning.
Tally-sticks cast adrift are a symbol that the trapper's warfare against the muskrats is ended and that the decimated remnant of the tribe is left in peace to reestablish itself.
First the water with Muskrats and occasionally a Mink, next the little marsh, always there, but greatly increased now by the back-up of the water.
But just as sure as the pond became a gathering place for Muskrats it would also become a gathering place for Mink.
The Muskrats were to be seen every evening in the calm pool, and fish in great numbers were in the deeper parts.
Hence the expense of embanking them is formidable,--a circumstance for which the muskrats have no consideration.
And when the muskrats heard that wild laughter, they bobbed up their furry heads, those in the water; and those on land sat up like squirrels to listen, and all were as delighted as possible because the sound was so very far away!
Well, you know, it was no joke hunting the Water Babies, for the old muskrats could fight, and would, and did!
Those folks that think muskrats and other wild creatures have sense, would have said it was all planned out ahead--it happened so quick.
In many localities great numbers of muskrats are also captured by spearing, either through the ice or through the walls of their houses.
For the capture of woodchucks, muskrats and house-rats, the wire noose may also be adapted to good purpose.
Muskrats are mostly nocturnal in their habits; they are tireless swimmers, and in the winter travel great distances beneath the ice; all of which peculiarities are like the beaver.
Fishes, frogs, and muskrats are his especial delight, and he will occasionally succeed in pouncing upon a snipe or wild duck, which he will greedily devour.
The muskrats will thus be led to the barrel, and will be certain to jump in after the tempting morsels, and their escape is impossible.
Muskrats are frequently caught in this trap, it being generally buried in the ground so that its top is on a level with the surface.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "muskrats" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
