THE MOON OF THE MOLES

In his seven-month life the male mole has dug four miles of runways-based on five major tunnel-routes—but he has "never been out of the soil"; he has not seen the light nor is he affected by day and night, living instead on a ten-hour cycle set by his body-needs: five hours to search for food, five to sleep. And his need for food is prodigious—a daily ounce to sustain his body-weight of only an ounce-and-a-half. Thus graphically do we meet the common eastern mole busy under the Great Plains in the generally dormant months of December and January. His heightened sense of smell and touch compensates for his feeble vision; his fur, appropriately for a mobile digger, has "no wrong way"; he is less endangered by enemies than by separation from his food supply—by the coyote's cutting off his tunnel rather than by the coyote itself. And by the bulldozer that cuts a tunnel open, exposing him for the first time to open air, strange smells, the electrifying light of the moon. Shortly he locates his hole and closes it up; the new highway built by the bulldozer will be "the frontier for generations of moles to come." Vividly informative—a remark that encompasses the potent pen drawings also.