From the Norwich Mercury E. Kay Robinson (1902) - A good fall of snow in the evening, overlaying all traces of the day's traffic of beast and bird along the hedgerow and covertside, help the gamekeeper more than a week of watching. Next day the country is spread out like a fair clean sheet of white paper, on which every animal and bird has written for him a story of its doings.

   Along the first hedgerow he comes upon the track of a stoat in the snow - an unmistakeable blazon, because the stoat travels with a precise sort gallop, all four feet being planted so close together that the track often suggests that some two-footed creature with a round blunt foot and a stride of some fifteen inches has passed that way. When the snow is melting the prints of the four little feet become plain; but the keeper knows the track well, and as he tramps down the hedge he keeps his eye on it​. When the stoat is hunting down the hedgerow he makes little excursions, now into the field in quest of roosting ground-birds, now through the hedge, on the chance of hare, hedge-bird or rat; but when the track keeps straight on the keeper knows that the vermin was going somewhere with a definite object. Presently it turns aside up the hedge-bank and into the hedge. The keeper's eye follows it, and sees that it makes a broad smudge through the snow-crests on the bank. This tells the whole story. The stoat kept a straight line down the hedge, because it was going home; and its hunt had been successful. You could not tell this so long as it galloped over the smooth snow, with head upraised. carrying its prey in its mouth: but, in climbing the bank, its load dragged in the snow, making the smudge that caught the keeper's eye. Sometimes the stoat's track will lead across a board over a stream, under a twisted tree-root, or through a hole in a hollow bank. All these will be noted. 

   The weasel footsteps are less compactly planted, but the groups of four are much less widely separated than the stoat's. Indeed the weasel's gallop is scarcely more pronounced than the rat's, though the latter is hall-marked by the clean knife-cut of its trailing tail through the snow. It is always worth while to follow a weasel's track, because it gives you such an insight into the business-like methods of the little vermin. ​​Perhaps you strike it at a gate and follow it some dozen yards, in and out of the hedge; then it goes off at right angles to the cornstack, of which it makes a complete circuit and then passes obliquely to the other hedge. In and out it goes, and at last passes through. So you have to hark back to the gate and take it up on the other side where it goes, with the accuracy of experience, straight across the snow to the end of the little dyke. The banks of this have been very carefully hunted, the little beast jumping the narrow water every few yards. He has a special weakness, one would judge from this, for the snipe which always haunt these little, unfrozen spring-fed dykes in hard weather. He has reconnoitred a few yards of the bank of the trout stream, into which the water of the dyke passes through a drain pipe, and then turned sharply back to the hedge. Here the tracks go in and out, backwards and forwards, until, just as you are despairing of making out which way the little beast has gone, you may see something scuttling, rat-like, through the hedge roots, and catch a glimpse of a snaky head brown head and white throat, raised for a moment to look upon you, with an angry snarl that shows its tiny teeth. The next instant it is gone, and you may as well turn your attention to something else. You will not see that weasel again to-day.​

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