Jim's heart gave a big and sudden
jump of delight when he saw the work going on.
"Bless my soul, I wonder if it's a girl mouse an' we're goin' to have
BABIES!" he gasped.
After that he did not wear the coat, through fear of disturbing the nest.
The two became more and more friendly, until finally the mouse would sit
on Jim's shoulder at meal time, and nibble at bannock. What little
trouble the mouse caused only added to Falkner's love for it.
"He's a human little cuss," he told himself one day, as he watched the
mouse busy at work caching away scraps of food, which it carried through
a crack in the sapling floor. "He's that human I've got to put all my
grab in the tin cans or we'll go short before spring!" His chief trouble
was to keep his snowshoes out of his tiny companion's reach. The mouse
had developed an unholy passion for babiche, the caribou skin thongs used
in the webs of his shoes, and one of the webs was half eaten away before
Falkner discovered what was going on. At last he was compelled to suspend
the shoes from a nail driven in one of the roof-beams.
In the evening, when the stove glowed hot, and a cotton wick sputtered in
a pan of caribou grease on the table, Falkner's chief diversion was to
tell the mouse all about his plans, and hopes, and what had happened in
the past. He took an almost boyish pleasure in these one-sided
entertainments--and yet, after all, they were not entirely one-sided, for
the mouse would keep its bright, serious-looking little eyes on Falkner's
face; it seemed to understand, if it could not talk.
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