The meadow lodge is built thus: The muskrat first chooses a large tussock of sedge that stands well out of the water for his bedstead.
As he dashed forward over the difficult ground, he jumped fromtussock to tussock, stepped upon roots and masses of dry moss, and avoided every bit of soft exposed earth where a track would remain imprinted.
The same bleak, windy weather as yesterday, made the tussock country look, if possible, drearier than ever.
In this stage the insect curls itself up under the protection of a silken cocoon like the tussock moth, or of a curled leaf like the brown-tail moth, or it may be entirely unsheltered like the pupa of the elm leaf beetle.
As he went along, then, occupied with these thoughts, he perceived on the summit of a height that rose before their eyes a man who went springing from rock to rock and from tussock to tussock with marvellous agility.
With no small effort I raised my head above the ooze and slime, withdrew my right arm from the sodden morass, out of which it came with a hideous squelch, and felt all round for some firmtussock of grass or rushes.
Here and there, where the sun was reflected from it, it shone like silver, and where some mischievous hill-wind had torn a rent in it, a splash of brown heath or a tussock of purple heather broke colouringly through.
With them have gone a fair portion of the tussock worms, but the sparrow holds his own.
The nest is always made near fresh water, and in many cases absolutely floats on rafts of fallen and rotting vegetation several yards from the bank, or rests in some tussock surrounded by shallow water.
The nest is a mere depression, often in a tussock of grass or rushes, or beneath a small bush, or even in a patch of thrift on bare sandy soil, lined with a few scraps of withered vegetation, or enclosed with a few twigs or roots.
The nest is usually made in a tussock of sedge, beneath a bush, or amongst rushes and coarse grass, and is a mere hollow lined with a little dry vegetation, and an abundance of down from the female.
During the rest of that day Martin sulked by himself behind a great tussock of grass, refusing to eat with the others, and when one of the women went to him and offered him a piece of meat he struck it vindictively out of her hand.
At length, tired with running, he coiled himself in a large tussockof dry grass and went to sleep, just as if he had been accustomed to sleep out of doors all his life.
Then he crossed a swale of brown reeds and tussock set with little pools of water, opaque and grey in the rain.
Advancing cautiously to the river front, Gunga Dass stepped from tussock to tussockuntil he had reached a smooth patch of sand directly in the line of the boat's fire.
I feel like a novice lumbering through a bog in a midst, jumping from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort to move on without knowing where I am going.
The slopes rise in a series of terraces which are generally soggy and covered with tussock (pleurophyllum) and with scattered cushions of Azorella.
Here and there across its surface were huge mounds of earth and rock and, occasionally, a small lakelet fringed with a dense growth of tussock and Maori cabbage.
He refers to the penguins, kelp-weed and tussock grass; certainly three characteristic features.
It is of a more vivid green than the tussock and is edible, though somewhat stringy and insipid.
Both had been stacked in cases among the tussock and rocks, well back from the waters of Aerial Cove on the western side of Wireless Hill.
As the shore approached we came to thick tussock and Maori cabbage, and the travelling became much rougher.
Hundreds of sea elephants, mostly of the season's young, lay about in the tussock or amongst the rocks.
All the flowering plants were now showing their extremely modest blooms, and the tussock looked like a field of wheat, each stem having a decided ear.
The pups when weaned get such rough usage in the rookery that they soon make off into the tussock and sleep for about a month, living on their fat and acquiring a new coat.
They make a nest of grass, generally at the root of a tussock growing on the cliff-front, and when the building is in progress the two birds sit side by side entwining their necks, rubbing beaks and at intervals uttering their harsh cries.
He and Hamilton were engaged cutting a track through the tussock from the Shack to the beach, when the spade wielded by Hamilton struck Blake's foot, cutting through the boot and inflicting a wound on the great toe.
They build nests of tussockon rocks close to the water or maybe on the ground.
Beneath each tussock had lain concealed a small heap of broken china, which must have been placed there in the dead of the night.
It was placed high and dry on a tussock in a flaming patch of hawkweed.
Now comes the winter wren, peeping and prying round about a mossy tussock like a little mouse, but far more self-contained.
Forgetting all his doubts as to bogholes and morasses, he grasped his own pole, and sprang from tussock to tussock, till he had reached the bank of the ditch or water-course in which the unfortunate sportsman was floundering.
Much scared, he tried to wade out, but could only flounder to a tussock of grass, and cling there, while he endeavored to kick his legs free.
Few people passed along the lane, and the sun was setting, so the prospect of a night in the marsh nerved Sam to make a frantic plunge toward the bulrush island, which was nearer than the mainland, and looked firmer than any tussock round him.
