The flying squirrel was one of the most interesting of the little
animals we found in the woods, a beautiful brown creature, with fine
eyes and smooth, soft fur like that of a mole or field mouse. He is
about half as long as the gray squirrel, but his wide-spread tail and
the folds of skin along his sides that form the wings make him look
broad and flat, something like a kite. In the evenings our cat often
brought them to her kittens at the shanty, and later we saw them fly
during the day from the trees we were chopping. They jumped and glided
off smoothly and apparently without effort, like birds, as soon as
they heard and felt the breaking shock of the strained fibres at the
stump, when the trees they were in began to totter and groan. They can
fly, or rather glide, twenty or thirty yards from the top of a tree
twenty or thirty feet high to the foot of another, gliding upward as
they reach the trunk, or if the distance is too great they alight
comfortably on the ground and make haste to the nearest tree, and
climb just like the wingless squirrels.
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