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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!houxm!hound!ganns
From: ganns@hound.UUCP (R.GANNS)
Newsgroups: net.pets
Subject: fiddle tunes and weasels
Message-ID: <1532@hound.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Dec-85 08:36:17 EST
Article-I.D.: hound.1532
Posted: Thu Dec  5 08:36:17 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 6-Dec-85 07:12:08 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel NJ
Lines: 21

I don't know if or how cats respond to music, but a polecat can.
A few years back I lived in a small one-room cabin near Fairbanks, Alaska
and at one point during the winter, a least weasel moved in with me.
These little guys are about the size of a small lab rat, pure white
except for the very tip of its tail, which was black, and it looked like
a miniature arctic fox. It did a great job of cleaning the field mice
out of my cabin, and kept its distance, hiding behind furniture and
occasionally poking its head out from behind the refrigerator, etc. to
see what I was up to.

One evening a friend who plays fiddle came over, and we (me on banjo)
were playing some old southern mountain tunes when the weasel came out
of hiding and sat right down in the middle of the floor between us and
listened intently to our playing for 20 minutes or so before shuffling
back off behind the easy chair.

Incidentally, the way I first realized that something was living in the
cabin with me was that one morning I found a pile of chicken bones in
the underwear section of my dresser; now, there were some fairly
off-the-wall people living up there at the time, and this gave me a bit
of a jolt until I spotted the weasel later on.