thing to find one.  During the early days of automobiles, these huge bull snakes, or gopher snakes, as I prefer to call them, would lie across the sunny, dusty roads, and drivers of cars delighted in running them down.  Since they are very docile, they are the least afraid of man of any members of the local snake family.  They are slow in movement until they sense the immediate presence of their natural food, which is live mice, rats, gophers, squirrels, young rabbits, and sometimes, though rarely, birds.  Then it is they become alert, and the horny appendage on their tails vibrates with a high-pitched, buzzing sound, simulating, although not similar to, the sound of a poisonous rattlesnake.

When I first brought some of these snakes to my farm, I loosed them and they wandered off to a neighbor’s premises where they were promptly found and killed.  Later importations I confined to my basement, where I built an artificial pool with frogs and fish in it.  However, I could never induce the bull snakes to eat any of these batrachians.  They would, almost playfully, stalk the frogs, but at the moment when one was within reach, the snake would glide away.  Neither would the snakes, unless force-fed, eat anything they had not caught themselves.

My children were delighted to have the snakes there and made pets of them.  Only once was one of the girls bitten when she attempted force-feeding.  The bite was a mere scratch but we feared that it might be slightly poisonous.  However, it healed so promptly that it was quite apparent that the bull snake’s bite is not toxic.  I, too, have had my skin slightly punctured by their teeth, but always the wound healed with no more pain or trouble than a pin prick.  Such is not at all the case when a person is nipped by a squirrel or gopher.  I have purposely allowed a pocket gopher to bite me, to determine what the effects are.  The pain was severe and healing was slow.  Once, bitten by a gray squirrel when I reached into a hollow tree to get it, I received such a wound that fever started in my whole hand.  Its teeth punctured a finger-nail and were stopped only by meeting the bone.  Such bites I consider rather poisonous.

Rabbits also committed much damage at my nursery by gnawing the bark of my trees, especially during times of deep snow.  They did not bother the walnuts particularly, but were very fond of hickories and pecan trees.  On the smallest ones, they cut branches off and carried them away to their nests.  On larger trees, they gnawed the bark off of most of the lower branches.  This was dangerous but seldom fatal, whereas the gnawing of mice, near the base of the trunks, was such that in some cases when complete girdling occurred, it was necessary to use bridge-grafting to save the trees.  This consists of connecting the bark immediately above the roots with the bark above the girdled portion, so that the tree can receive and send the food substances it elaborates to its upper and lower parts.