[i]

FOREST NEIGHBORS

[ii]

[iii]

The Beaver Lumbering.

[iv]

FOREST NEIGHBORS

LIFE STORIES OF WILD ANIMALS

BY

WILLIAM DAVENPORT HULBERT

[v]

[vi]

[vii]

CONTENTS

[ix]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[xi]

INTRODUCTION

[xii]
[xiii]

There were no settlers anywhere near, nor even any
Indians, yet there was no lack of inhabitants. Bears and
wolves and a host of smaller animals were to be found, and
along the shores were runways that had been worn deep
in the soil by the tread of generation after generation of
dainty little cloven hoofs. I suppose that some of those
paths have been used by the deer for hundreds, and perhaps
thousands, of years.

The lands around the entire lake were offered for sale
by the United States Government at the ridiculously low
price which Uncle Sam has asked for most of his possessions;
and with the help of some friends my father bought
the whole shore. During the years which followed he was
occupied in various ways, and some of the best recollections
of my boyhood are of the days and the nights which I spent
with him on his fishing-tug, steaming about the Straits of
Mackinac and the northern part of Lake Huron. But he
could not forget the Glimmerglass, that little wild lake up
in the woods. He had fallen in love with it at first sight,
and at last he took his family and went there to live.

Human neighbors were scarce around the lake, and[xv]
perhaps that was one reason why we took such a lively
interest in the other residents—those who were there ahead
of us. “Him and me’s chums,” my small sister said of
the red-squirrel that hung around the log-barn. And some
of the animals seemed to take a very lively interest in us.
The chipmunks came into the house occasionally, on foraging
expeditions; and so, I regret to say, did the skunks.
There was a woodchuck who used to come to the back door,
looking for scraps, and who learned to sit bolt upright
and hold a pancake in his fore paws while he nibbled at it,
without being in the least disturbed by the presence and the
comments of half a dozen spectators. The porcupines
became a never-ending nuisance, for they made almost
nightly visits to the woodshed. To kill them was of little
use, for the next night—or perhaps before morning—there
were others to take their places. Once in a while one of
them would climb up onto the roof of the house; and
between his teeth and his feet and the rattling of his quills
on the shingles, the racket that he made was out of all proportion
to his size.

[xvi]

The wolves had been pretty nearly exterminated since my
father’s first visit to the lake, and we saw little or nothing
of them. The bears seemed to be more numerous, but they
were very shy and retiring. We found their tracks more
often than we came upon the animals themselves. Some of
the cat tribe remained, and occasionally placed themselves in
evidence. My brother came in one day from a long tramp
on snow-shoes, and told how he had met one of them standing
guard over the remains of a deer, and how the lynx
had held him up and made him go around. Beavers were
getting scarce, though a few were still left on the more
secluded streams. Deer, on the contrary, were very plentiful.
Many a time they invaded our garden-patch and
helped themselves to our fresh vegetables.

One August afternoon a flock of eight young partridges,
of that spring’s hatching, coolly marched out of the woods
and into the clearing, as if they were bent on investigating
their new neighbors. Partridges appear to be subject to
occasional fits of stupidity, and to temporary (or possibly
permanent) loss of common-sense; but it may be that in
this case the birds were too young and inexperienced to realize
what they were doing. Or perhaps they knew that it
was Sunday, and that the rules of the household forbade[xvii]
shooting on that day. If so, their confidence was sadly
misplaced. We didn’t shoot them, but we did surround
them, and by working carefully and cautiously we
“shooed” them into an empty log-house. And the next
day we had them for dinner.

Around the shores of the Glimmerglass a few loons and
wild-ducks usually nested, and in the autumn the large
flocks from the Far North often stopped there for short
visits, on their way south for the winter. They were more
sociable than you would suppose—or at least the loons were—and
the same small girl who had made friends with the
red-squirrel learned to talk to the big birds.

Down in the water the herring and a large species of
salmon trout made their homes, and probably enjoyed themselves
till they met with the gill-net and the trolling-hook.
But herring and salmon trout did not satisfy us; we
wanted brook trout, too. And so one day a shipment of
babies arrived from the hatchery at Sault Ste. Marie, and
thus we first became acquainted with the habits of infant
fishes, and learned something of their needs and the methods
of their foster-parents.

One after another our neighbors introduced themselves,
each in his own way. And they were good neighbors, all[xviii]
of them. Even the porcupines and the skunks were interesting—in
their peculiar fashion—and I wish there were
none worse than they in the city’s slums.

I have said good-by to the Glimmerglass, and it may be
that I shall never again make my home by its shores. But
the life of the woods goes on, and will still go on as long
as man will let it. I suppose that, even as I write, the
bears are “holeing up” for the winter, and the deer are
growing anxious because the snow is covering the best of
their food, and they of the cat tribe are getting down to
business, and hunting in deadly earnest. The loons and
the ducks have pulled out for the Gulf of Mexico, and the
squirrels are glad that they have such a goodly store of
nuts laid up for the next four months. The beavers have
retired to their lodges—that is, if Charley Roop and his
fellows have left any of them alive. The partridges—well,
the partridges will just have to get along the best way they
can. I guess they’ll pull through somehow. The porcupines
are all right, as you will presently see if you read this
book. They don’t have to worry. Down in the bed of the
trout stream the trout eggs are getting ready—getting
ready. And out on the lake itself the frost is at work,
and the ice-sheet is forming, and under that cold, white lid[xix]
the Glimmerglass will wait till another year brings round
another spring-time—the spring-time that will surely come
to all of us if only we hold on long enough.

Chicago, December, 1901.

[1]

THE BIOGRAPHY OF A BEAVER

[3]

In a moment his little brown head reappeared, and he
and his brothers and sisters went chasing each other
round and round the pond, ducking and diving and
splashing, raising such a commotion that they sent the
ripples washing all along the grassy shores, and having
the jolliest kind of a time. It isn’t the usual thing for
young beavers to be out in broad daylight, but all this
happened in the good old days before the railways came,[4]
when northern Michigan was less infested with men than
it is now.

When the youngsters wanted a change they climbed up
onto a log, and nudged and hunched each other, poking
their noses into one another’s fat little sides, and each
trying to shove his brother or sister back into the water.
By and by they scrambled out on the bank, and then, when
their fur had dripped a little, they set to work to comb
it. Up they sat on their hind legs and tails—the tail
was a stool now, you see—and scratched their heads and
shoulders with the long brown claws of their small, black,
hairy hands. Then the hind feet came up one at a time,
and combed and stroked their sides till the moisture was
gone and the fur was soft and smooth and glossy as
velvet. After that they had to have another romp.
They were not half as graceful on land as they had been
in the water. In fact they were not graceful at all, and
the way they stood around on their hind legs, and shuffled,
and pranced, and wheeled like baby hippopotami,
and slapped the ground with their tails, was one of the
funniest sights in the heart of the woods. And the funniest
and liveliest of them all was the one who owned that
tail—the tail which, when I last saw it, was lying on[5]
the ground in front of Charlie Roop’s shack. He was
the one whom I shall call the Beaver—with a big B.

But even young beavers will sometimes grow tired of
play, and at last they all lay down on the grass in the
warm, quiet sunshine of the autumn afternoon. The
wind had gone to sleep, the pond glittered like steel in
its bed of grassy beaver-meadow, the friendly woods stood
guard all around, the enemy was far away, and it was a
very good time for five furry little babies to take a nap.

The city in which the tail first made its appearance was
a very ancient one, and may have been the oldest town on
the North American continent. Nobody knows when
the first stick was laid in the dam that changed a small
natural pond into a large artificial one, and thus opened
the way for further municipal improvements; but it was
probably centuries ago, and for all we can tell it may
have been thousands of years back in the past. Generation
after generation of beavers had worked on that dam,
building it a little higher and a little higher, a little
longer and a little longer, year after year; and raising
their lodges as the pond rose around them. Theirs was
a maritime city, for most of its streets were of water, like
those of Venice; rich cargoes of food-stuffs came floating[6]
to its very doors, and they themselves were navigators
from their earliest youth, and took to the water as naturally
as ducks or Englishmen. They were lumbermen,
too, and when the timber was all cut from along the
shores of the pond they dug canals across the low, level,
marshy ground, back to the higher land where the birch
and the poplar still grew, and floated the branches and
the smaller logs down the artificial water-ways. And
there were land roads, as well as canals, for here and
there narrow trails crossed the swamp, showing where
generations of busy workers had passed back and forth
between the felled tree and the water’s edge. Streets,
canals, public works, dwellings, commerce, lumbering,
rich stores laid up for the winter—what more do you
want to constitute a city, even if the houses are few in
number, and the population somewhat smaller than that
of London or New York?

“On the grass in the warm, quiet sunshine of an autumn afternoon.”

There was a time, not very long before the Beaver was
born, when for a few years the city was deserted. The
trappers had swept through the country, and the citizens’
skulls had been hung up on the bushes, while their skins
went to the great London fur market. Few were left alive,
and those few were driven from their homes and scattered[7]
through the woods. The trappers decided that the ground
was worked out, and most of them pushed on to the north
and west in search of regions not yet depopulated. Then,
one by one, the beavers came back to their old haunts.
The broken dam was repaired; new lodges were built, and
new beavers born in them; and again the ancient town was
alive with the play of the babies and the labors of the civil
engineers. Not as populous, perhaps, as it had once been,
but alive, and busy, and happy. And so it was when our
Beaver came into the world.

The first year of his life was an easy one, especially the
winter, when there was little for anyone to do except to
eat, to sleep, and now and then to fish for the roots of the
yellow water-lily in the soft mud at the bottom of the
pond. During that season he probably accomplished
more than his parents did, for if he could not toil he could
at least grow. Of course they may have been growing,
too, but it was less noticeable in them than in him. Not
only was he increasing in size and weight, but he was storing
up strength and strenuousness for the work that lay
before him. It would take much muscle to force those
long yellow teeth of his through the hard, tough flesh of
the maple or the birch or the poplar. It would take vigor[8]
and push and enterprise to roll the heavy billets of wood
over the grass-tufts to the edge of the water. And, most
of all, it would take strength and nerve and determination
to tear himself away from a steel trap and leave a foot
behind. So it was well for the youngster that for a time
he had nothing to do but grow.

Spring came at last, and many of the male beavers prepared
to leave home for a while. The ladies seemed to
prefer not to be bothered by the presence of men-folk
during the earliest infancy of the children; so the men,
probably nothing loath, took advantage of the opportunity
to see something of the world, wandering by night
up and down the streams, and hiding by day in burrows
under the banks. For a time they enjoyed it, but as the
summer dragged by they came straggling home one after
another. The new babies who had arrived in their
absence had passed the most troublesome age, and it was
time to begin work again. The dam and the lodges
needed repairs, and there was much food to be gathered
and laid up for the coming winter.

Now, on a dark autumn night, behold the young Beaver
toiling with might and main. His parents have felled a
tree, and it is his business to help them cut up the best[9]
portions and carry them home. He gnaws off a small
branch, seizes the butt end between his teeth, swings it
over his shoulder, and makes for the water, keeping his
head twisted around to the right or left so that the end
of the branch may trail on the ground behind him. Sometimes
he even rises on his hind legs, and walks almost upright,
with his broad, strong tail for a prop to keep him
from tipping over backward if his load happens to catch
on something. Arrived at the canal or at the edge of the
pond, he jumps in and swims for town, still carrying the
branch over his shoulder, and finally leaves it on the growing
pile in front of his father’s lodge. Or perhaps the
stick is too large and too heavy to be carried in such a
way. In that case it must be cut into short billets and
rolled, as a cant-hook man rolls a log down a skidway.
Only the Beaver has no cant-hook to help him, and no
skidway, either. All he can do is to push with all his
might, and there are so many, many grass-tufts and little
hillocks in the way! And sometimes the billet rolls down
into a hollow, and then it is very hard to get it out again.
He works like a beaver, and pushes and shoves and toils
with tremendous energy, but I am afraid that more than
one choice stick never reaches the water.[10]

These were his first tasks. Later on he learned to fell
trees himself. Standing up on his hind legs and tail, with
his hands braced against the trunk, he would hold his head
sidewise, open his mouth wide, set his teeth against the
bark, and bring his jaws together with a savage nip that
left a deep gash in the side of the tree. A second nip
deepened the gash, and gave it more of a downward slant,
and two or three more carried it still farther into the
tough wood. Then he would choose a new spot a little
farther down, and start a second gash, which was made
to slant up toward the first. And when he thought
that they were both deep enough he would set his teeth
firmly in the wood between them, and pull and jerk and
twist at it until he had wrenched out a chip—a chip perhaps
two inches long, and from an eighth to a quarter of an
inch thick. He would make bigger ones when he grew to
be bigger himself, but you mustn’t expect too much at first.
Chip after chip was torn out in this way, and gradually
he would work around the tree until he had completely
encircled it. Then the groove was made deeper, and after
a while it would have to be broadened so that he could
get his head farther into it. He seemed to think it was
of immense importance to get the job done as quickly as[11]
possible, for he worked away with tremendous energy and
eagerness, as if felling that tree was the only thing in the
world that was worth doing. Once in a while he would
pause for a moment to feel of it with his hands, and to
glance up at the top to see whether it was getting ready
to fall, and several times he stopped long enough to take
a refreshing dip in the pond; but he always hurried back,
and pitched in again harder than ever. In fact, he sometimes
went at it so impetuously that he slipped and rolled
over on his back. Little by little he dug away the tree’s
flesh until there was nothing left but its heart, and at last
it began to crack and rend. The Beaver jumped aside to
get out of the way, and hundreds and hundreds of small,
tender branches, and delicious little twigs and buds came
crashing down where he could cut them off and eat them
or carry them away at his leisure.

And so the citizens labored, and their labor brought its
rich reward, and everybody was busy and contented, and
life was decidedly worth living.

But one black November night our hero’s father, the
wisest old beaver in all the town, went out to his work
and never came home again. A trapper had found the
rebuilt city—a scientific trapper who had studied his[12]
profession for years, and who knew just how to go to
work. He kept away from the lodges as long as he
could, so as not to frighten anyone; and before he set
a single trap he looked the ground over very carefully,
located the different trails that ran back from the water’s
edge toward the timber, visited the stumps of the felled
trees, and paid particular attention to the tooth-marks
on the chips. No two beavers leave marks that are
exactly alike. The teeth of one are flatter or rounder
than those of another, while a third has large or small
nicks in the edges of his yellow chisels; and each tooth
leaves its own peculiar signature behind it. By noting
all these things the trapper concluded that a particular
runway in the wet, grassy margin of the pond was the
one by which a certain old beaver always left the water
in going to his night’s labor. That beaver, he decided,
would best be the first one taken, for he was probably the
head of a family, and an elderly person of much wisdom
and experience; and if one of his children should be
caught first he might become alarmed, and take the lead
in a general exodus.

So the trapper set a heavy double-spring trap in the
edge of the water at the foot of the runway, and covered[13]
it with a thin sheet of moss. And that night, as the old
beaver came swimming up to the shore, he put his foot
down where he shouldn’t, and two steel jaws flew up and
clasped him around the thigh. He had felt that grip
before. Was not half of his right hand gone, and three
toes from his left hind foot? But this was a far more
serious matter than either of those adventures. It was
not a hand that was caught this time, nor yet a toe, or
toes. It was his right hind leg, well up toward his
body, and the strongest beaver that ever lived could not
have pulled himself free. Now when a beaver is frightened,
he of course makes for deep water. There, he
thinks, no enemy can follow him; and, what is more, it
is the highway to his lodge, and to the burrow that he
has hollowed in the bank for a refuge in case his house
should be attacked. So this beaver turned and jumped
back into the water the way he had come; but, alas! he
took his enemy with him. The heavy trap dragged him
to the bottom like a stone, and the short chain fastened
to a stake kept him from going very far toward home.
For a few minutes he struggled with all his might, and
the soft black mud rose about him in inky clouds. Then
he quieted down and lay very, very still; and the next[14]
day the trapper came along and pulled him out by the
chain.

Something else happened the same night. Another
wise old beaver, the head man of another lodge, was
killed by a falling tree. He ought to have known better
than to let such a thing happen. I really don’t see how
he could have been so careless. But the best of us will
make mistakes at times, and any pitcher may go once too
often to the well. I suppose that he had felled hundreds
of trees and bushes, big and little, in the course of his
life, and he had never yet met with an accident; but this
time he thought he would take one more bite after the
tree had really begun to fall. So he thrust his head
again into the narrowing notch, and the wooden jaws
closed upon him with a nip that was worse than his own.
He tried to draw back, but it was too late, his skull
crashed in, and his life went out like a candle.

And so, in a few hours, the city lost two of its best
citizens—the very two whom it could least afford to lose.
If they had been spared they might, perhaps, have
known enough to scent the coming danger, and to lead
their families and neighbors away from the doomed
town, deeper into the heart of the wilderness. As it[15]
was, the trapper had things all his own way, and by
working carefully and cautiously he added skin after skin
to his store of beaver-pelts. I haven’t time to tell you
of all the different ways in which he set his traps, nor
can we stop to talk of the various baits that he used,
from castoreum to fresh sticks of birch or willow, or of
those other traps, still more artfully arranged, which had
no bait at all, but were cunningly hidden where the poor
beavers would be almost certain to step into them before
they saw them. After all, it was his awful success that
mattered, rather than the way in which he achieved it.
Our friend’s mother was one of the next to go, and the
way his brothers and sisters disappeared one after another
was a thing to break one’s heart.

One night the Beaver himself came swimming down the
pond, homeward bound, and as he dived and approached
the submarine entrance of the lodge he noticed some
stakes driven into the mud—stakes that had never been
there before. They seemed to form two rows, one on
each side of his course, but as there was room enough
for him to pass between them he swam straight ahead
without stopping. His hands had no webs between the
fingers, and were of little use in swimming, so he had[16]
folded them back against his body; but his big feet
were working like the wheels of a twin-screw steamer,
and he was forging along at a great rate. Suddenly,
half-way down the lines of stakes, his breast touched the
pan of a steel trap, and the jaws flew up quick as a
wink and strong as a vise. Fortunately there was nothing
that they could take hold of. They struck him so
hard that they lifted him bodily upward, but they
caught only a few hairs.

Even a scientific trapper may sometimes make mistakes,
and when this one came around to visit his trap, and
found it sprung but empty, he thought that the beavers
must have learned its secret and sprung it on purpose.
There was no use, he decided, in trying to catch such intelligent
animals in their own doorway, and he took the
trap up and set it in a more out-of-the-way place. And
so one source of danger was removed, just because the
Beaver was lucky enough to touch the pan with his
breast instead of with a foot.

A week later he was really caught by his right hand,
and met with one of the most thrilling adventures of his
life. Oh, but that was a glorious night! Dark as a
pocket, no wind, thick black clouds overhead, and the[17]
rain coming down in a steady, steady drizzles—just the
kind of a night that the beavers love, when the friendly
darkness shuts their little city in from all the rest of the
world, and when they feel safe and secure. Then, how
the long yellow teeth gouge and tear at the tough wood,
how the trees come tumbling down, and how the branches
and the little logs come hurrying in to augment the winter
food-piles! Often of late the Beaver had noticed an
unpleasant odor along the shores, an odor that frightened
him and made him very uneasy, but to-night the rain
had washed it all away, and the woods smelled as sweet
and clean as if God had just made them over new. And
on this night, of all others, the Beaver put his hand
squarely into a steel trap.

He was in a shallow portion of the pond, and the chain
was too short for him to reach water deep enough to
drown him; but now a new danger appeared, for there
on the low, mossy bank was an otter, glaring at him
through the darkness. Beaver-meat makes a very acceptable
meal for an otter, and the Beaver knew it. And
he knew, also, how utterly helpless he was, either to fly
or to resist, with that heavy trap on his arm, and its
chain binding him to the stake. His heart sank like[18]
lead, and he trembled from his nose to the end of his
tail, and whimpered and cried like a baby. But,
strange to say, it was the trapper who saved him, though,
of course, it was done quite unintentionally. As the
otter advanced to the attack there came a sudden sharp
click, and in another second he too was struggling for
dear life. Two traps had been set in the shallow
water. The Beaver had found one, and the otter the
other.

The full story of that night, with all its details of fear
and suffering and pain, will never be written; and probably
it is as well that it should not be. But I can give you
a few of the facts, if you care to hear them. The Beaver
soon found that he was out of the otter’s reach, and with
his fears relieved on that point he set to work to free himself
from the trap. Round and round he twisted, till there
came a little snap, and the bone of his arm broke short off
in the steel jaws. Then for a long, long time he pulled
and pulled with all his might, and at last the tough skin
was rent apart, and the muscles and sinews were torn out
by the roots. His right hand was gone, and he was so
weak and faint that it seemed as if all the strength and
life of his whole body had gone with it. No matter. He[19]
was free, and he swam away to the nearest burrow and
lay down to rest. The otter tried to do the same, but he
was caught by the thick of his thigh, and his case was a
hopeless one. Next day the trapper found him alive, but
very meek and quiet, worn out with fear and useless
struggles. In the other trap were a beaver’s hand and
some long shreds of flesh and sinew that must once have
reached well up into the shoulder.

We shall have to hurry over the events of the next winter—the
last winter in the city’s history. By the time the
Beaver’s wound was healed—Nature was good to him, and
the skin soon grew over the torn stump—the pond was
covered with ice. The beavers, only half as numerous as
they had been a few weeks before, kept close in their
lodges and burrows, and for a time they lived in peace and
quiet, and their numbers suffered no further diminution.
Then the trapper took to setting his traps through the
ice, and before long matters were worse than ever. By
spring the few beavers that remained were so thoroughly
frightened that the ancient town was again abandoned—this
time forever. The lodges fell to ruins, the burrows
caved in, the dam gave way, the pond and canals were
drained, and that was the end of the city.[20]

Yet not quite the end, after all. The beavers have vanished
from their old habitation, but their work remains
in the broad meadows cleared of timber by their teeth,
and covered with rich black soil by the inundations from
their dam. There is an Indian legend which says that
after the Creator separated the land from the water He
employed gigantic beavers to smooth it down and prepare
it for the abode of men. However that may be, the farmers
of generations to come will have reason to rise up
and bless those busy little citizens—but I don’t suppose
they will ever do it.

One city was gone, but there were two that could
claim the honor of being our Beaver’s home at different
periods of his life. The first, as we have already seen,
was ancient and historic. The second was brand-new.
Let us see how it had its beginning. The Beaver got
married about the time he left his old home; and this, by
the way, is a very good thing to do when you want to
start a new town. Except for his missing hand, his wife
was so like him that it would have puzzled you to tell
which was which. I think it is very likely that she was
his twin sister, but of course that’s none of our business.
Do you want to know what they looked like? They[21]
measured about three feet six inches from tip of nose to
tip of tail, and they weighed perhaps thirty pounds
apiece. Their bodies were heavy and clumsy, and were
covered with thick, soft, grayish under-fur, which in turn
was overlaid with longer hairs of a glistening chestnut-brown,
making a coat that was thoroughly water-proof as
well as very beautiful. Their heads were somewhat like
those of gigantic rats, with small, light-brown eyes, little
round ears covered with hair, and long orange-colored incisors
looking out from between parted lips. One portrait
will answer for both of them.

They wandered about for some time, looking for a suitable
location, and examining several spots along the beds of
various little rivers, none of which seemed to be just right.
But at last they found, in the very heart of the wilderness,
a place where a shallow stream ran over a hard stony bottom,
and here they set to work. It was a very desirable
situation in every respect. At one side stood a large
tree, so close that it could probably be used as a buttress
for the dam when the latter was sufficiently lengthened to
reach it; while above the shallow the ground was low and
flat on both sides for some distance back from the banks,
so that the pond would have plenty of room to spread[22]
out. If they could have spoken they would probably
have said that the place was a dam site better than any
other they had seen.

Building the Dam.

Alder bushes laid lengthwise of the current were the first
materials used, and for a time the water filtered through
them with hardly a pause. Then the beavers began laying
mud and stones and moss on this brush foundation,
scooping them up with their hands, and holding them
under their chins as they waddled or swam to the dam.
The Beaver himself was not very good at this sort of
work, for his right hand was gone, as we know, and it
was not easy for him to carry things; but he did the best
he could, and together they accomplished a great deal.
The mud and the grass and such-like materials were
deposited mainly on the upper face of the dam, where
the pressure of the water only sufficed to drive them
tighter in among the brush; and thus, little by little, a
smooth bank of earth was presented to the current,
backed up on the lower side by a tangle of sticks and
poles. Its top was very level and straight, and along its
whole length the water trickled over in a succession of
tiny rills. This was important, for if all the overflow
had been in one place the stream might have been so[23]
strong and rapid as to eat into the dam, and perhaps
carry away the whole structure.

The first year the beavers did not try to raise the stream
more than a foot above its original level. There was
much other work to be done—a house to be built, and
food to be laid in for the winter—and if they spent too
much time on the dam they might freeze or starve before
spring. A few rods up-stream was a grassy point which
the rising waters had transformed into an island, and here
they built their lodge, a hollow mound of sticks and mud,
with a small, cave-like chamber in the centre, from which
two tunnels led out under the pond—”angles,” the trappers
call them. The walls were masses of earth and
wood and stones, so thick and solid that even a man with
an axe would have found it difficult to penetrate them.
Only at the very apex of the mound there was no mud,
nothing but tangled sticks through which a breath of
fresh air found its way now and then. In spite of this
feeble attempt at ventilation I am obliged to admit that
the atmosphere of the lodge was often a good deal like
that of the Black Hole of Calcutta, but beavers are so
constituted that they do not need much oxygen, and they
did not seem to mind it. In all other respects the house[24]
was neat and clean. The floor was only two or three
inches above the level of the water in the angles, and
would naturally have been a bed of mud; but they mixed
little twigs with it, and stamped and pounded it down
till it was hard and smooth. I think likely the Beaver’s
tail had something to do with this part of the work, as
well as with finishing off the dam, for he was fond of
slapping things with it, and it was just the right shape
for such use. In fact, I fear that if it had not been for
the tail, and for other tails like it, neither of the cities
would ever have been as complete as they were. With
the ends of projecting sticks cut off to leave the walls
even and regular, and with long grass carried in to make
the beds, the lodge was finished and ready.

And now you might have seen the beavers coming home
to rest after a night’s labor at felling timber—swimming
across the pond toward the island, with only the tops
of their two little heads showing above the water. In
front of the lodge each tail-rudder gives a slap and a
twist, and they dive for the submarine door of one of the
angles. In another second they are swimming along the
dark, narrow tunnel, making the water surge around
them. Suddenly the roof of the passage rises, and their[25]
heads pop up into the air. A yard or two farther, and
they enter the chamber of the lodge, with its level floor
and its low, arched roof. And there in the darkness
they lie down on their grass beds and go to sleep. It is
good to have a home of your own where you may take
your ease when the night’s work is done.

Near the upper end of the pond, where the bank was
higher, they dug a long burrow, running back ten or fifteen
feet into the ground. This was to be the last
resort if, by any possibility, the lodge should ever be invaded.
It was a weary task, digging that burrow, for its
mouth was deep under the water, and every few minutes
they had to stop work and come to the surface for breath.
Night after night they scooped and shovelled, rushing the
job as fast as they knew how, but making pretty slow
progress in spite of all their efforts. It was done at
last, however, and they felt easier in their minds when
they knew that it was ready for use in case of necessity.
From its mouth in the depths of the pond it sloped
gradually upward to a dry chamber under the roots of a
large birch; and here, where a few tiny holes were not
likely to be noticed from the outside, two or three small
openings, almost hidden by the moss and dead leaves, let[26]
in the air and an occasional ray of light. The big tree
made a solid roof overhead, and the chamber was large
enough, with a little crowding, to accommodate a whole
family of beavers.

There was only one other heavy task, and that was the
gathering of the wood, which, with its bark, was to serve
as food through the winter. This too was finally finished,
and the very last things that the beavers did that
fall were to put another coat of mud on the outside of the
lodge, and to see that the dam was in the best possible
condition. No repairing could be done after the ice made;
and if the dam should give way at any time during the
winter, the pond would be drained, and the entrances of
the lodge and the burrow would be thrown open to any
prowling marauders that might happen to pass that way.
So it was imperative to have things in good order before
cold weather came on.

There came a quiet, windless day, when the sky was gray,
and when the big snow-flakes came floating lazily down,
some to lose themselves in the black water, and some to
robe the woods and the shores in white. At nightfall the
clouds broke up, the stars shone forth, and the air grew
odder and keener till long crystal spears shot out across[27]
the pond, and before morning a sheet of glass had spread
from shore to shore. I do not think it was unwelcome.
The beavers were shut in for the winter, or could only go
abroad with considerable difficulty, but they had each
other, and there was a little world of their own down under
the ice and snow. The chamber of the lodge was home,
and just outside was their food storehouse—the big pile
of wood which it had cost so much labor to gather. One
of the entrances was shorter and straighter than the other,
and through this they used to bring in sticks from the
heap, and lay them on the floor between the beds, where
they could devour the bark at their leisure. If they grew
restless, and wanted to go farther afield, there was the
bottom of the pond to be explored, and the big luscious
lily-roots to be dug up for a change of diet. It was a
peaceful time, a time of rest from the labors of the past
year, and of growing fat and strong for those of the year
to come. We have much goods laid up for many months;
let us eat, drink, and be merry, and hope that the trappers
will not come to-morrow.

The babies came in May, and I suppose that the young
father and mother were almost as proud and happy as
some of you who are in similar circumstances. The Beaver[28]
did not wander very far from home that spring and summer,
nor was he away very long at a time.

There were five of the children, and they were very pretty—about
as large as rats, and covered with thick, soft,
silky, reddish-brown fur, but without any of the longer,
coarser, chestnut-colored hairs that formed their parents’
outer coats. They were very playful, too, as the father and
mother had been in their own youthful days. For a while
they had to be nursed, like other babies; but by and by
the old beavers began to bring in little twigs for them,
about the size of lead-pencils; and if you had been there,
and your eyes had been sharp enough to pierce the gloom,
you might have seen the youngsters exercising their brand
new teeth, and learning to sit up and hold sticks in their
baby hands while they ate the bark. And wouldn’t you
have liked to be present on the night when they first went
swimming down the long, dark tunnel; and, rising to the
surface, looked around on their world of woods and water—on
the quiet pond, with its glassy smoothness broken
only by their own ripples; on the tall trees, lifting their
fingers toward the sky; and on the stars, marching silently
across the heavens, and looking down with still, unwinking
eyes on another family of babies that had come[29]
to live and love and be happy for a little while on God’s
earth?

One of the children was killed by an otter before the
summer was over, but I am glad to say that the other
four grew up and were a credit to their parents.

The babies were not the only addition to the new city
during that year, for about mid-summer another pair of
beavers came and built a lodge near the upper end of the
pond. It was a busy season for everybody—for our old
friends as well as for the new-comers. The food-sticks which
had been peeled off their bark during the winter furnished
a good supply of construction material, and the dam was
built up several inches higher, and was lengthened to the
buttress-tree on one side, and for a distance of two or
three rods on the other, so as to keep the water from flowing
around the ends. As the water-level rose it became
necessary to build up the floor of the lodge in order to
keep it from being flooded; and that, in turn, necessitated
raising the roof by the simple process of hollowing it out
from within and adding more material on the outside.
In the same way the lodge was made both longer and
broader, to accommodate the growing family and the still
further increase that was to be expected the following[30]
spring. More burrows were dug in the shore of the pond—you
can’t have too many of them—and a much larger stock
of food wood was gathered, for there were six mouths, instead
of two, to be fed through the coming winter. The
father and mother worked very hard, and even the babies
helped with the lighter tasks, such as carrying home small
branches, and mending little leaks in the dam. The
second pair of beavers was also busy with lodge and burrow
and storehouse, and so the days slipped by very
rapidly.

Only once that year did a man come to town, and
then he did not do anything very dreadful. He was
not a trapper, he was only an amateur naturalist who
wanted to see the beavers at their work, and who
thought he was smart enough to catch them at it. His
plan was simple enough; he made a breach in the dam
one night, and then climbed a tree and waited for them
to come and mend it. It was bright moonlight, and he
thought he would see the whole thing and learn some
wonderful secrets.

The Beaver was at work in the woods not very far
away, and presently he came down to the edge of the
pond, rolling a heavy birch cutting before him. He[31]
noticed at once that the water was falling, and he
started straight for the dam to see what was the matter.
The amateur naturalist saw him coming, a dark speck
moving swiftly down the pond, with a long V-shaped
ripple spreading out behind him like the flanks of a
flock of wild geese. But the beaver was doing some
thinking while he swam. He had never before known
the water to fall so suddenly and rapidly; there must be
a very bad break in the dam. How could it have happened?
It looked suspicious. It looked very suspicious
indeed; and just before he reached the dam he stopped
to reconnoitre, and at once caught sight of the naturalist
up in the tree. His tail rose in the air and came down
with the loudest whack that had ever echoed across the
pond, a stroke that sent the spray flying in every direction,
and that might have been heard three-quarters of
a mile away. His wife heard it, and paused in her
work of felling a tree; the children heard it, and the
neighbors heard it; and they all knew it meant business.
The Beaver dived like a loon and swam for dear life,
and he did not come to the surface again till he had
reached the farther end of the pond and was out of
sight behind a grassy point. There he stayed, now and[32]
then striking the water with his tail as a signal that the
danger was not yet over. It isn’t every animal that can
use his caudal appendage as a stool, as a rudder, as a
third hind leg, as a trowel for smoothing the floor of his
house, and as a tocsin for alarming his fellow-citizens.

The naturalist roosted in the tree till his teeth were
chattering and he was fairly blue with cold, and then he
scrambled down and went back to his camp, where he
had a violent chill. The next night it rained, and as he
did not want to get wet there was nothing to do but
stay in his tent. When he visited the pond again the
dam had been repaired and the water was up to its usual
level. He decided that watching beavers wasn’t very
interesting, hardly worth the trouble it cost; and he
guessed he knew enough about them, anyhow. So
the next day he packed up his camping outfit and went
home.

In the following year the population was increased to
eighteen, for six more babies arrived in our Beaver’s
lodge, and four in his neighbors’. In another twelvemonth
the first four were old enough to build lodges and
found homes of their own; and so the city grew, and
our Beaver and his wife were the original inhabitants,[33]
the first settlers, the most looked-up-to of all the citizens.
You are not to suppose, however, that the Beaver
was mayor of the town. There was no city government.
The family was the unit, and each household was
a law unto itself. But that did not keep him from
being the oldest, the wisest, the most knowing of all
the beavers in the community, just as his father had
been before him in another town.

I don’t believe you care to hear all about the years
that followed. They were years of peace and growth, of
marriages and homebuilding, of many births and a
few deaths, of winter rest and summer labor, and of
quiet domestic happiness. There was little excitement,
and, best of all, there were no trappers. The time
came when the Beaver might well say, as he looked
around on the community which he and his wife had
founded, that he was a citizen of no mean city.

But this could not last. A great calamity was coming—a
calamity beside which the slow destruction of the former
town would seem tame and uninteresting.

One bright February day the Beaver and his wife left
their lodge to look for lily-roots. They had found a big
fat one and were just about to begin their feast, when[34]
they heard foot-steps on the ice over their heads, and the
voices of several men talking eagerly. They made for
the nearest burrow as fast as they could go, and stayed
there the rest of the day, and when they returned to
their lodge they found—but I’m going too fast.

The men were Indians and half-breeds, and they were
in high feather over their discovery. Around this pond
there must be enough beaver-skins to keep them in groceries
and tobacco and whiskey for a long time to come.
But to find a city is one thing, and to get hold of its inhabitants
is another and a very different one. One of
the Indians was an elderly man who in the old days had
trapped beaver in Canada for the Hudson Bay Company,
and he assumed the direction of the work. First of all
they chopped holes in the ice and drove a line of stakes
across the stream just above the pond, so that no one
might escape in that direction. Then, by pounding on
the ice, and cutting more holes in it here and there, they
found the entrances to all the lodges and most of the burrows,
and closed them also with stakes driven into the
bottom. Fortunately they did not find the burrow
where our Beaver and his wife had taken refuge. They
were about to break open the roofs of the lodges when[35]
the old man proposed that they should play a trick on
one of the beaver families—a trick which his father had
taught him when he was a boy, and when the beavers
were many in the woods around Lake Superior. He described
it with enthusiasm, and his companions agreed
that it would be great fun. For a time there was much
chopping of ice and driving of stakes, and then all was
quiet again.

By and by one of our Beaver’s children began to feel
hungry, and as his father and mother had not come home
he decided to go out to the wood-pile and get something
to eat. So he took a header from his bed into the water,
and swam down the angle. The door had been unbarred
again, and he passed out without difficulty, but when he
reached the pile he found it surrounded by a fence made
of stakes set so close together that he could not pass between
them. He swam clear around it, and at last found
one gap just wide enough to admit his body. He passed
in, and as he did so his back grazed a small twig which
had been thrust down through a hole in the ice, and the
watching Indians saw it move, and knew that a beaver
had entered the trap. He picked out a nice stick of convenient
size, and started to return to the lodge. But[36]
where was that gap in the fence? This was the place,
he was sure. Here were two stakes between which he
had certainly passed as he came in, but now another
stood squarely between them, and the gate was barred.
He swam all round the wood-pile, looking for a way out,
and poking his little brown nose between the stakes, but
there was no escape, and when he came back to the
entrance and found it still closed his last hope died, and
he gave up in despair. His heart and lungs and all his
circulatory apparatus had been so designed by the Great
Architect that he might live for many minutes under
water, but they could not keep him alive indefinitely.
Overhead was the ice, and all around was that cruel
fence. Only a rod away was home, where his brothers
and sisters were waiting for him, and where there was air
to breathe and life to live—but he could not reach it.
You have all read or heard how a drowning man feels,
and I suppose it is much the same with a drowning
beaver. They say it is an easy death.

By and by a hooked stick came down through a hole
in the ice and drew him out, the gate was unbarred, the
twig was replaced, and the Indians waited for another
hungry little beaver to come for his dinner. That’s[37]
enough. You know now what the parents found when
they came home—or rather what they didn’t find.

It would have taken too long to dispose of the whole city
in this way, so the Indians finally broke the dam and let
the water out of the pond, and then they tore open the
lodges and all the burrows they could find, and the inhabitants
were put to the—not the sword, but the axe
and the club. Of all those who had been so happy
and prosperous, the old Beaver and his wife were the
only ones who escaped; and their lives were spared only
because the Indians failed to find their hiding-place.

That was the end of the second city, but it was not quite
the end of the beavers. A few miles up-stream they dug
a short burrow in the bank and tried to make a new home.
In May another baby came, but only one, and it was dead
before it was born. Next day the mother died too, and
the Beaver left the burrow and went out into the world
alone. I really think his heart was broken, though it
continued to beat for several months longer.

Just northeast of the Glimmerglass there lies a long,
narrow pond, whose shores are very low and swampy, and
whose waters drain into the larger lake through a short
stream only a few rods in length. Hundreds, perhaps[38]
thousands, of years ago the narrow strip of land that
separates them may possibly have been a beaver-dam, but
to-day it is hard to tell it from one of Nature’s own formations.
In the course of his lonely wanderings the
Beaver reached this pond, and here he established himself
to spend his last few weeks. He was aging rapidly. Such
a little while ago he had seemed in the very prime of life,
and had been one of the handsomest beavers in the woods,
with fur of the thickest and softest and silkiest, and a
weight of probably sixty pounds. Now he was thin and
lean, his hair was falling out, his teeth were losing their
sharp edges and becoming blunt and almost useless, and
even his flat tail was growing thicker and more rounded,
and its whack was not as startling as of old when he
brought it down with all his might on the surface of the
water.

Yet even now the old instinct flamed up and burned feebly
for a little while. Or shall we say the old love of work,
and of using the powers and faculties that God had given
him? Why should the thing that is called genius in a
man be set down as instinct when we see it on a somewhat
smaller scale in an animal? Whatever it was, the ruling
passion was still strong. All his life he had been a civil[39]
engineer; and now, one dark, rainy autumn night, he left
his shallow burrow, swam down the pond to its outlet, and
began to build a dam. The next day, pushing up the
shallow stream in my dug-out canoe, I saw the alder-cuttings
lying in its bed, with the marks of his dull teeth on
their butts. God knows why he did it, or what he was
thinking about as he cut those bushes and dragged them
into the water. I don’t; but sometimes I wonder if a
wild dream of a new lodge, a new mate, a new home, and
a new city was flitting through his poor, befogged old
brain.

It was only a few nights later that he put his foot into
Charlie Roop’s beaver-trap, jumped for deep water, and
was drowned like his father before him. Charlie afterward
showed me the pelt, which he had stretched on a
hoop made of a little birch sapling. It was not a very
good pelt, for, as I said, the Beaver had been losing his
hair, but Charlie thought he might get a dollar or two
for it. Whether he needed the dollar more than the
Beaver needed his skin was a question which it seemed
quite useless to discuss.

As we left the shack I noticed the tail lying on the
ground just outside the door.[40]

“Why don’t you eat it?” I asked. “Don’t you know
that a beaver’s tail is supposed to be one of the finest delicacies
in the woods?”

“Huh!” said Charlie. “I’d rather have salt pork.”

[41]

THE KING OF THE TROUT STREAM

[43]

Mingled with its waters, and borne onward and downward
by the ceaseless flow of its current, went multitudes of the
tiniest air-bubbles, most of them too small ever to be seen
by a human eye, yet large enough to be the very breath
of life to thousands and thousands of creatures. Some of
them found their way to the gills of the brook trout, and
some to the minnows, and the herrings, and the suckers,
and the star-gazers; some fed the little crustacea, and the
insect larvæ, and the other tiny water animals that make up
the lower classes of society; and some passed undetained
down the river and out into Lake Superior. But there[44]
were others that worked down into the gravel of the riverbed;
and there, in the nooks and crannies between the
pebbles, they found a vast number of little balls of yellow-brown
jelly, about as large as small peas, which seemed to
be in need of their kindly ministrations. And the air-bubbles
touched the trout eggs gently and lovingly, and
in some mysterious and wonderful way their oxygen
passed in through the pores of the shells, and the embryos
within were quickened and stirred to a new vigor and a
more rapid growth.

Not all of the eggs were alive. Some had been
crushed between the stones; some were buried in sediment,
which had choked the pores and kept away the
friendly oxygen until they smothered; and some had
never really lived at all. But one danger they had been
spared, for there were no saw-mills on the stream to send
a flood of fungus-breeding sawdust down with the current.
And in spite of all the misfortunes and disasters
to which trout eggs are liable, a goodly number of
them were doing quite as well as could be expected. I
suppose one could hardly say that they were being incubated,
for, according to the dictionaries, to incubate is
to sit upon, and certainly there was no one sitting on[45]
them. Their mothers had not come near them since the
day they were laid. But the gravel hid them from the
eyes of egg-eating fishes and musk-rats; the water kept
them cold, but not too cold; the fresh oxygen came and
encouraged them if ever they grew tired and dull, and so
the good work went on.

Through each thin, leathery, semi-transparent shell you
could have seen, if you had examined it closely, a pair
of bright, beady eyes, and a dark little thread of a backbone
that was always curled up like a horseshoe because
there wasn’t room for it to lie straight. But
along the outside of the curve of each spinal column a
set of the tiniest and daintiest muscles was getting ready
for a long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull all together.
And one day, late in the winter, when the
woods were just beginning to think about spring, the
muscles in one particular egg tugged with all their little
might, the backbone straightened with a great effort,
the shell was ripped open, and the tail of a brand-new
brook trout thrust itself out into the water and wiggled
pathetically.

But his head and shoulders were still inside, and for a
while it looked as if he would never get them free. His[46]
tail was shaped somewhat like a paddle set on edge, for
a long, narrow fin ran from the middle of his back clear
around the end of it and forward again on the under
side of his body, and with this for an oar he struggled
and writhed and squirmed, and went bumping blindly
about among the pebbles like a kitten with its head in
the cream pitcher. And at last, with the most vigorous
squirm and wriggle of all, he backed clear of the shell in
which he had lain for so many weeks and months, and,
weak and weary from his exertions, lay down on a stone
to rest.

He had to lie on his side, for attached to his breast was
a large, round, transparent sac which looked very much
like the egg out of which he had just come. In fact it
really was the egg, or at least a portion of it, for it held
a large part of what had been the yolk. If you could
have examined him with a microscope you would have
seen a most strange and beautiful thing. His little body
was so delicate and transparent that one could see the
arteries pulsing and throbbing in time with the beating
of his heart, and some of those arteries found their way
into the food-sac, where they kept branching and dividing,
and growing smaller and more numerous. And in[47]
the very smallest of the tiny tubes a wonderful process
was going on—as wonderful as the way in which the
oxygen fed the embryos through the shell. Somehow,
by life’s marvellous alchemy, the blood was laying hold
of the material of the yolk, turning it into more blood,
and carrying it away to be used in building up bone and
muscle everywhere from the tip of his nose to the end of
his tail. You might not have detected the actual
transformation, but you could have seen the beating of
the engine, and the throbbing rush of the little red
rivers, all toiling with might and main to make a big,
strong trout out of this weak and diminutive baby.
And you could have seen the corpuscles hurrying along
so thick and fast that at times they blocked up the passages,
and the current was checked till the heart could
bring enough pressure to bear to burst the dam and
send them rushing on again. For the corpuscles of
a trout’s blood are considerably larger than those of
most fishes, and they sometimes get “hung up,” like a
drive of logs sent down a stream hardly large enough to
float it.

With a full haversack to be drawn upon in such a
convenient manner the Troutlet was not obliged to take[48]
food through his mouth or to think about hustling
around in search of a living. This was very fortunate,
for the stream was full of hungry beasts of prey who
would be very likely to gobble him up quick the first
time he went abroad; and, besides, his frail little body
was still so weak and delicate that he could not bear the
light of day. So, instead of swimming away to seek his
fortune, he simply dived down deeper into the gravel,
and stayed there. For some weeks he led a very quiet
life among the pebbles, and the only mishap that befell
him during that time was the direct result of his retiring
disposition. In his anxiety to get as far away from
the world as possible he one day wedged himself into a
cranny so narrow that he couldn’t get out again. He
couldn’t even breathe, for his gill-covers were squeezed
down against the sides of his head as if he were in a
vise. A trout’s method of respiration is to open his
mouth and fill it with water, and then to close it again
and force the water out through his gills, between his
cheeks and his shoulders, about where his neck would be
if he had one. It’s very simple when you once know
how, but you can’t do it with your gill-covers clamped
down. His tail wiggled more pathetically than ever,[49]
and did its level best to pull him out, but without success.
He was wedged in so tightly that he couldn’t
move, and he was fast smothering, like a baby that has
rolled over on its face upon the pillow. But at the last
moment, when his struggles had grown feebler and
feebler until they had almost ceased, something stirred
up the gravel around him and set him free. He never
knew what did it. Perhaps a deer or a bear waded
through the stream; or a saw-log may have grounded
for a moment in the shallow; or possibly it was only the
current, for by this time most of the snow had melted,
and the little river was working night and day to carry
the water out of the woods. But whatever it was, he was
saved.

He stayed in the gravel nearly a month, but his yolk-sac
was gradually shrinking, and after a time it drew
itself up into a little cleft in his breast and almost disappeared.
There was nothing left of it but a little amber-colored
bead, and it could no longer supply food enough
for his growing body. There were times when he felt
decidedly hungry. And other changes had come while
he lay and waited in the gravel. The embryonic fin
which had made his tail so like a paddle was gone, the[50]
true dorsal and caudal and anal fins had taken their
proper shape, and he looked a little less like a tadpole
and a little more like a fish. He was stronger than he
had been at first, and he was losing his dread of the sunlight;
and so at last he left the gravel-bed, to seek his
rightful place in the world of moving, murmuring waters.

He was rather weak and listless at first, and quite
given to resting in the shallows and back water, and
taking things as easily as possible. But that was to be
expected for a time, and he was much better off than
some of the other trout babies. He saw one that had
two heads and only one body, and another with two
heads and two bodies joined together at the tail. Still
others there were who had never been strong enough to
straighten their backbones, and who had lain in the egg
till the shell wore thin and let them out head first, which
is not at all the proper way for a trout to hatch. Even
now they still retained the horseshoe curve, and could
never swim straight ahead, but only spin round and
round like whirligigs. These cripples and weaklings
seemed to have got on pretty well as long as their food-sacs
lasted, but now that they had to make their own
living they were at a serious disadvantage. They all[51]
disappeared after a day or two, and our friend never saw
them again. They couldn’t stand the real struggle of
life.

Many a strong, healthy baby disappeared at the same
time, and if there had not been so many of them it is not
likely that any would have survived the first few days and
weeks. Even as it was, I doubt if more than one fish out
of each thousand eggs ever lived to grow up. It is not
difficult to guess where they went. Our Trout had hardly
emerged from his hiding-place in the gravel when a queer,
ugly, big-headed little fish darted at him from under a
stone, with his jaws open and an awful cavity yawning
behind them. The Troutlet dodged between a couple of
pebbles and escaped, but another youngster just beyond
him was caught and swallowed alive. That was his first
meeting with the star-gazer, who kills more babies than
ever Herod did. Then there were minnows, and herrings,
and lizards, and frogs, and weasels, and water-snakes, and
other butchers of all sorts and sizes, too numerous to mention.
And perhaps the worst of all were the older trout,
who never seemed to have the least compunction about
eating their small relations, and who were so nimble and
lively that it was almost impossible to keep out of their[52]
way. Our friend spent most of his time in the shallow
water near the banks, where larger fishes were not so
likely to follow him, but even there he had many narrow
escapes and was obliged to keep himself hidden as much
as possible under chips and dead leaves, and behind
stones.

Often he found himself in great peril when he least
suspected it. Once he lay for some time in the edge of a
dark forest of water-weeds, only an inch from a lumpish,
stupid-looking creature, half covered with mud, that was
clinging to one of the stems. The animal appeared so
dull and unintelligent that the young Trout paid little
attention to him until another baby came up and approached
a trifle closer. Then, quick as a flash, the creature
shot out an arm nearly three-quarters of an inch
long, bearing on its end two horrible things which were
not exactly claws, nor fingers, nor teeth, but which partook
of the nature of all three, and which came together
on the infant’s soft, helpless little body like a pair of tongs
or the jaws of a steel trap, and drew him in to where the
real jaws were waiting to make mince-meat of him. Our
friend fled so precipitately that he did not see the end of
the tragedy, but neither did he ever see that baby again.[53]
Before the summer had passed, the dull, lumpish-looking
creature had become a magnificent insect, with long, gauzy
wings, clad in glittering mail, and known to everybody as
a dragon-fly, but I doubt if any of his performances in the
upper air were ever half as dragon-like as the deeds of
darkness that he did when he was an ugly, shapeless
larva down under the water.

Fortunately, not all the larvæ in the stream were thus
to be feared. Many were so small that the Troutlet could
eat them, instead of letting them eat him; and nowhere
were they more plentiful than in this same forest of water-weeds.
His first taste of food was a great experience, and
gave him some entirely new ideas of life. One day he
was lying with his head up-stream, as was his usual habit,
when a particularly fat, plump little larva, torn from his
home by the remorseless river, came drifting down with the
current. He looked very tempting, and our friend sallied
out from under a stick and caught him on the fly, just
as he had seen the star-gazer catch his own brother. The
funny little creature wriggled deliciously on his tongue,
and he held him between his jaws for a moment in a kind
of ecstasy; but he couldn’t quite make up his mind to
swallow him, and presently he spat him out again and[54]
went back to the shadow of his stick to rest and think
about it. It was the first time in his life that he had
ever done such a thing, and he felt rather overwhelmed,
but an hour or two later he tried it again, and this time
the living morsel did not stop in his mouth, but went
straight on down.

It was really something more than a new experience—this
first mouthful of food—for it marked a turning-point
in his career. Up to this time he had lived entirely
on the provisions which his parents had left him,
but henceforth he was independent and could take care
of himself. He was no longer an embryo; he was a real
fish, a genuine Salvelinus fontinalis, as carnivorous as the
biggest and fiercest of all his relations. The cleft in his
breast might close up now, and the last remnant of his
yolk-sac vanish forever. He was done with it. He had
graduated from the nursery, and had found his place on
the battle-field of life.

It must be admitted, however, that he did not look
much like a mature trout, even now. He was less than
three-quarters of an inch long, and his big head, bulging
eyes, and capacious mouth were out of all proportion to
his small and feeble body. But time and food were all[55]
that was needed to set these matters right; and now that
he had learned how, he set to work and did his level best.
I should be afraid to guess how many tiny water-creatures,
insects and larvæ and crustaceæ, found their way down
his throat, but it is pretty safe to say that he often ate
more than his own weight in a single day. And so he
grew in size and strength and symmetry, and from being
a quiet, languid baby, always hiding in dark corners, and
attending strictly to his own affairs, he became one of the
liveliest and most inquisitive little fishes in all the stream.
To a certain extent he developed a fondness for travelling,
and in company with other troutlets of his own age and
size he often journeyed from place to place in search of
new surroundings and new things to eat. In fly-time he
found a bountiful food-supply in the mosquitoes and
black-flies that swarmed over the stream, and it was fun
to see him leap from the water, catch one of them in his
mouth, and drop back with a triumphant little splash.
It wasn’t really very considerate in him to prey on those
biting, stinging flies, for in after years they would be his
best defenders against anglers and fishermen, but consideration
doesn’t seem to be one of the strong points in a
brook trout’s character.[56]

It would take too long to tell of all his youthful
doings during the next year, and of all his narrow
escapes, and the many tight places that he got into and
out of. It was a wonder that he ever pulled through at
all, but I suppose it is necessary that a few trout should
grow up, for, if they didn’t, who would there be to eat
the little ones?

Once a kingfisher dived for him, missed him by a hair’s-breadth,
and flew back, scolding and chattering, to his
perch on an old stub that leaned far out over the water.
And once he had a horrible vision of an immense loon
close behind him, with long neck stretched out, and huge
bill just ready to make the fatal grab. He dodged and
got away, but it frightened him about as badly as anything
can frighten a creature with no more nerves than a
fish. And many other such adventures he had—too
many to enumerate. However, I don’t think they ever
troubled him very much except for the moment. He
grew more wary, no doubt, but he didn’t do much worrying.
Somehow or other he always escaped by the skin of
his teeth, and the next spring he was swallowing the new
crop of young fry with as little concern as his older relations
had shown in trying to swallow him. So far he[57]
seemed to be one of the few who are foreordained to eat
and not be eaten, though it was more than likely that in
the end he, too, would die a violent death.

When he was about a year and a half old he noticed
that all the larger trout in the stream were gathering in
places where the water was shallow, the bottom pebbly,
and the current rapid; and that they acted as if they
thought they had very important business on hand. He
wanted to do as the others did, and so it happened that
he went back again to the gravelly shallow where the air-bubbles
had first found him. By this time he was about
as large as your finger, or possibly a trifle larger, and he
had all the bumptiousness of youth and was somewhat
given to pushing himself in where he wasn’t wanted.

The male trout were the first to arrive, and they
promptly set to work to prepare nests for their mates,
who were expected a little later. It was a simple process.
All they did was to shove the gravel aside with their
noses and fins and tails, and then fan the sediment away
until they had made nice, clean little hollows in the bed
of the stream; but there was a good deal of excitement
and jealousy over it, and every little while they had to
stop and have a scrap. The biggest and strongest[58]
always wanted the best places, and if they happened to
take a fancy for a location occupied by a smaller and
weaker fish, they drove him out without ceremony and
took possession by right of the conqueror. For the most
part their fighting seemed rather tame, for they did little
more than butt each other in the ribs with their noses,
but once in a while they really got their dander up and
bit quite savagely. And when the lady trout came to
inspect the nests that had been prepared for them, then
times were livelier than ever, and the jealousy and rivalry
ran very high, indeed.

Of course our Trout was too young to bear a very
prominent part in these proceedings, but he and some
companions of about his own age skirmished around the
edges of the nesting grounds, and seemed to take a wicked
delight in teasing the old males and running away just in
time to escape punishment. And when the nests began
to be put to practical use, the yearlings were very much
in evidence. Strictly fresh eggs are as good eating down
under the water as they are on land, and, partly on this
account, and partly because direct sunshine is considered
very injurious to them, the mothers always covered them
with gravel as quickly as possible. But in spite of the[59]
best of care the current was constantly catching some of
them and sweeping them away, and our young friend
would creep up as near as he dared, and whenever one of
the yellow-brown balls came his way he would gobble it
down with as little remorse as he had felt for his first
larva. Now and then an irate father would turn upon
him fiercely and chase him off, but in a few minutes he
would be back again, watching for eggs as eagerly as ever.
Once, indeed, he had a rather close call, for the biggest
old male in all the stream came after him with mouth
open as if he would swallow him whole, as he could very
easily have done. Our friend was almost caught when
the big fellow happened to glance back and saw another
trout coming to visit his wife, and promptly abandoned
the chase and went home to see about it.

A year later our Trout went again to the gravelly
shallow, and this time, being six inches long and about
thirty months old, he decided to make a nest of his own.
He did so, and had just induced a most beautiful young
fish of the other sex to come and examine it, with a view
to matrimony, when that same big bully appeared on the
scene, promptly turned him out of house and home, and
began courting the beautiful young creature himself. It[60]
was very exasperating, not to say humiliating, but it was
the sort of thing that one must expect when one is only a
two-year-old.

The next year he had better luck. As another summer
passed away, and the cooler weather came on, he arrayed
himself in his wedding finery, and it almost seemed as if
he had stolen some of the colors of the swamp maples, in
their gay fall dress, and was using them to deck himself
out and make a brave display. In later years he was
larger and heavier, but I don’t think he was ever much
handsomer than he was in that fourth autumn of his life.
His back was a dark, dusky, olive-green, with mottlings
that were still darker and duskier. His sides were lighter—in
some places almost golden yellow; and scattered
irregularly over them were the small, bright carmine spots
that gave him one of his aliases, the “Speckled Trout.”
Beneath he was usually of a pale cream color, but now that
he had put on his best clothes his vest was bright orange,
and some of his fins were variegated with red and white,
while others were a fiery yellow. He was covered all over
with a suit of armor made of thousands and thousands of
tiny scales, so small and fine that the eye could hardly
separate them, and from the bony shoulder-girdle just behind[61]
his gills a raised line, dark and slightly waving, ran
back to his tail, like the sheer-line of a ship. There were
other fishes that were more slender and more finely modelled
than he, and possibly more graceful, but in him
there was something besides beauty—something that told
of power and speed and doggedness. He was like a
man-o’-war dressed out in all her bunting for some great
gala occasion, but still showing her grim, heavy outlines
beneath her decorations. His broad mouth opened clear
back under his eyes, and was armed with rows of backward-pointing
teeth, so sharp and strong that when they
once fastened themselves upon a smaller fish they never
let him go again. The only way out from between those
jaws was down his throat. His eyes were large and
bright, and were set well apart; and the bulge of his
forehead between them hinted at more brains than are
allotted to some of the people of the stream. Altogether,
he was a most gallant and knightly little fish,
and it would certainly have been a pity if he hadn’t
found a mate.

Nesting Grounds.

And now he started the third time for the gravelly
shallow, and travelled as he had never travelled before in
all his life. Streams are made to swim against—every[62]
brook trout knows that—and the faster they run, the
greater is the joy of breasting them. The higher the
water-fall, the prouder do you feel when you find you can
leap it. And our friend was in a mood for swimming,
and for swimming with all his might. Never had he felt
so strong and vigorous and so full of life and energy, and
he made his fins and his tail go like the oars of a racing-shell.
Now he was working up the swift current of a
long rapid like a bird in the teeth of the wind. Now he
was gathering all his strength for the great leap to the
top of the water-fall. And now, perhaps, he rested for a
little while in a quiet pool, and presently went hurrying
on again, diving under logs and fallen trees, swinging
round the curves, darting up the still places where the
water lay a-dreaming, and wriggling over shallow bars
where it was not half deep enough to cover him; until at
last he reached the old familiar place where so many generations
of brook trout had first seen the light of day
and felt the cold touch of the snow-water.

As before, he and the other males arrived at the nesting
grounds some days in advance of their mates, and spent
the intervening time in scooping hollows in the gravel
and quarrelling among themselves. Two or three times[63]
he was driven from a choice location by someone who
was bigger than he, but he always managed in some way
to regain it, or else stole another from a smaller fish;
and when the ladies finally appeared he had a fine large
nest in a pleasant situation a little apart from those of
his rivals. But for some reason the first candidates who
came to look at it declined to stay. Perhaps they were
not quite ready to settle down, or perhaps they were
merely disposed to insist on the feminine privilege of
changing their minds. But finally there came one who
seemed to be quite satisfied, and with whom the Trout
himself had every reason to be pleased.

She was not a native of the stream, but of one of the
hatcheries of the Michigan Fish Commission; and while
he was lying in the gravel she was one of a vast company
inhabiting a number of black wooden troughs that stood
in a large, pleasant room filled with the sound of running
water. Here there were no yearlings nor musk-rats nor
saw-bill ducks looking for fresh eggs, nor any dragons
nor star-gazers lying in wait for the young fry. Instead
there were nice, kind men, who kept the hatching troughs
clean and the water at the right temperature, and who
gently stirred up the troutlets with a long goose-feather[64]
whenever too many of them crowded together in one
corner, trying to get away from the hateful light. Under
this sort of treatment most of the thirty million babies
in the hatchery lived and thrived. Only a few thousands
of them were brook trout, but among those thousands
one of the smartest and most precocious was the one in
whom we are just now most interested. She was always
first into the dark corners, as long as dark corners seemed
desirable; and later, when they began to come up into the
light and partake of the pulverized beef-liver which their
attendants offered them, there was no better swimmer or
more voracious feeder than she. All this was especially
fortunate because there was a very hard and trying experience
before her—one in which she would have need
of all her strength and vitality, and in which her chances
of life would be very small, indeed. It came with planting
time, when she and a host of her companions were
whisked through a rubber tube and deposited in a big
can made of galvanized iron, in which they were borne
away to the trout stream. The journey was a long one,
they were pretty badly cramped for room, and before
they reached their destination the supply of oxygen in
the water became exhausted. The baby trout began to[65]
think they had blown out the gas, and they all crowded
to the surface, where, if anywhere, the minute bubbles
that keep one alive are to be found. They gulped down
great mouthfuls of water and forced it out through their
gills as fast as ever they could, but, somehow, all the life
seemed to be gone out of it, and it did them no good
whatever. Pretty soon a few turned over on their backs
and died, and every last one of them would have suffocated
if the man who had charge of the party hadn’t noticed
what was going on and come to the rescue. Picking
up a dipperful of water and troutlets, and holding it
high in the air, he poured it back into the can with much
dashing and splashing. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny
bubbles were caught in the rush and carried down to the
bottom, and so the oxygen came back again to the tired
gills, and the danger was over.

The emigrants reached the trout stream at last, and
one would have supposed that their troubles were ended.
In reality the chapter of trials and tribulations had only
just begun, for the same fishes and frogs and lizards that
had so persecuted our friend and his brothers and sisters
were on hand to welcome the new arrivals, and very few
escaped. And so, in spite of its quiet beginnings in the[66]
peaceful surroundings of the hatchery, this young lady
trout’s life proved quite as exciting and adventurous as
our friend’s, and it is possible that the good care which
she received during her early infancy really served to
make things all the harder for her when she came to be
thrown entirely on her own resources. The mere change
in the temperature of the water when she was turned out
of the can was quite a shock to her nervous system; and,
whereas most trout are somewhat acquainted with the
dangers and hardships of the stream, almost from the
time they rip their shells open, she did not even know
that there was such a place until she was set down in it
and told to shift for herself.

However, by dint of strength, speed, agility, and good
judgment in selecting hiding-places—and also, in all
probability, by a run of remarkably good luck—she
made her way unharmed through all the perils of babyhood
and early youth, and now she was one of the most
beautiful little three-year-old pirates that ever swooped
down upon a helpless victim.

As she and our friend swam side by side, her nose and
the end of her tail were exactly even with his. Her
colors were the same that he had worn before he put on[67]
his wedding garments, and if you had seen them together
in the early summer I don’t believe you could ever have
told them apart. They were a well-matched pair, more
evenly mated, probably, than is usual in fish marriages.

But they were not to be allowed to set up housekeeping
together without fighting for the privilege. Hardly
had she finished inspecting the nest, and made up her
mind that it would answer, and that he was, on the
whole, quite eligible as a husband, when a third trout
appeared and attempted to do as the big bully had done
the year before. This time, however, our young friend’s
blood was up, and, though the enemy was considerably
larger than he, he was ready to strike for his altars and
his fires. He made a quick rush, like a torpedo-boat
attacking a man-of-war, and hit the intruder amidships,
ramming him with all his might. Then the enemy
made as sudden a turn, and gave our Trout a poke in
the ribs, and for a few minutes they dodged back and
forth, and round and round, and over and under each
other, each getting in a punch whenever he had a
chance. So far it seemed only a trial of strength and
speed and dexterity, and if our Trout was not quite as[68]
large and powerful as the other, yet he proved himself
the quicker and the more agile and lively. But before
it was over he did more than that, for, suddenly ranging
up on the enemy’s starboard quarter, he opened his
mouth, and the sharp teeth of his lower jaw tore a row
of bright scales from his adversary’s side, and left a long,
deep gash behind. That settled it. The big fellow lit
out as fast as he could go, and our Trout was left in undisputed
possession.

The nesting season cannot last forever, and by and by,
when the days were very short and the nights were
very long, when the stars were bright, and when each
sunrise found the hoar-frost lying thick and heavy on
the dead and fallen leaves, the last trout went in search
of better feeding grounds, and again the gravelly
shallow seemed deserted. But it was only seeming.
There were no eggs in sight—the frogs, the rats, the
ducks, and the yearlings had taken care of that, and I
am very much afraid that our friend may have eaten a
few himself, on the sly, when his wife wasn’t looking—but
hidden away among the pebbles there were thousands,
and the old, old miracle was being re-enacted, and
multitudes of little live creatures were getting ready for[69]
the time when something should tell them to tear their
shells open and come out into the world.

One of the Trout’s most remarkable adventures, and
the one which probably taught him more than any other,
came during the hot weather of the following summer.
The stream had grown rather too warm for comfort, and
lately he had got into the habit of frequenting certain
deep, quiet pools where icy springs bubbled out of the
banks and imparted a very grateful coolness to the slow
current. It was delightful to spend a long July afternoon
in the wash below one of these fountains, having a
lazy, pleasant time, and enjoying the touch of the cold
water as it went sliding along his body from nose
to tail. One sunshiny day, as he lay in his favorite
spring-hole, thinking about nothing in particular, and
just working his fins enough to keep from drifting down
stream, a fly lit on the surface just over his head—a
bright, gayly colored fly of a species which was entirely
new to him, but which looked as if it must be very
finely flavored. As it happened, there had been several
days of very warm, sultry weather, and even the fish
had grown sullen and lazy, but this afternoon the wind
had whipped around to the north, straight off Lake Superior,[70]
and all the animals in the Great Tahquamenon
Swamp felt as if they had been made over new. How
the brook trout could have known of it so quickly, down
under the water, is a mystery; but our friend seemed
to wake up all of a sudden, and to realize that he hadn’t
been eating as much as usual, and that he was hungry.
He made a dash at the fly and seized it, but he had no
sooner got it between his lips than he spat it out again.
There was something wrong with it. Instead of being
soft and juicy and luscious, as all flies ought to be, it
was stiff, and dry, and hard, and it had a long, crooked
stinger that was different from anything belonging to
any other fly that he had ever tasted. It disappeared as
suddenly as it had come, and the Trout sank back to the
bottom of the pool.

But presently three more flies came down together,
and lit in a row, one behind another. They were different
from the first, and he decided to try again. He
chose the foremost of the three, and found it quite as ill-tasting
as the other had been; but this time he didn’t
spit it out, for the stinger was a little too quick for him,
and before he could let go it was fast in his lip. For the
next few minutes he tore around the pool as if he was[71]
crazy, frightening some of the smaller fishes almost out
of their wits, and sending them rushing up-stream in a
panic. He himself had more than once been badly
scared by seeing other trout do just what he was doing,
but he had never realized what it all meant. Now he
understood.

The first thing he did was to go shooting along the
surface for several feet, throwing his head from side to
side as he went, and doing his best to shake that horrible
fly out of his mouth. But it wouldn’t shake, so he tried
jumping out of the water and striking at the line with
his tail. That wasn’t any better, and next he rushed off
up the stream as hard as he could go. But the line kept
pulling him round to the left with gentle but irresistible
force, and before he knew it he was back in the pool
again. Wherever he went, and whatever he did, it was
always pulling, pulling, pulling—not hard enough to
tear the hook away, but just enough to keep him from
getting an inch of slack. If there had been any chance
to jerk he would probably have got loose in short order.
He rushed around the pool so hard that he soon grew
weary, and presently he sank to the bottom, hoping to
lie still for a few minutes, and rest, and perhaps think of[72]
some new way of escape. But even there that steady
tugging never ceased. It seemed as if it would pull his
jaw out of his head if he didn’t yield, and before long he
let himself be drawn up again to the surface. Once he
was so close to the shore that the angler made a thrust
at him with the landing-net, and just grazed his side.
It frightened him worse than ever, and he raced away
again so fast that the reel sang, and the line swished
through the water like a knife.

“He tried jumping out of the water.”

The other two flies were trailing behind, and the short
line that held them was constantly catching on his fins
and twisting itself around his tail in a way that annoyed
him greatly. He almost thought he could get away if
they were not there to hinder him. And yet, as it finally
turned out, it was one of those flies that saved his life.
He was coming slowly back from that last unsuccessful
rush for liberty, fighting for every inch, and only yielding
to a strength a thousand times greater than his own,
when the trailer caught on a sunken log and held fast.
Instantly the strain on his mouth relaxed. The angler
was no longer pulling on him, but on the log. He could
jerk now, and he immediately began to twitch his head
this way and that, backward and forward, right and left,[73]
tearing the hole in his lip a little larger at every yank,
until the hook came away and he was free.

It was a painful experience, and he carried the scar as
long as he lived, but the lesson he learned was worth all
it cost. I won’t say that he never touched bait again,
but he was much more cautious, and no other artificial
fly ever stung him as badly as that one.

The years went by, and the Trout increased in size
and strength and wisdom, as a trout should. One after
another his rivals went away to the happy hunting-grounds,
most of them losing their lives because they
could not resist the temptation to taste a made-up fly, or
to swallow a luscious angle-worm festooned on a dainty
little steel hook; and the number of fish who dared dispute
his right to do whatever he pleased grew beautifully
less. And at last there was only one trout left in all the
stream who was larger and stronger than he. That was
the same big fellow who had come so near swallowing
him on the occasion of his first visit to the nesting-grounds;
and the way the fierce, solemn old brute finally
departed this life deserves a paragraph all to itself.

It happened one morning in early spring, just after the
ice had gone out. Our friend was still a trifle sleepy and[74]
lazy after the long, dull winter, though he had an eye
open, as always, for anything particularly good to eat. I
doubt if he would have jumped at any kind of a fly, for
it was not the right time of year for flies, and he did not
believe in eating them out of season; but almost anything
else was welcome. He was faring very well that
morning, as it chanced, for the stream was running high,
and many a delicious grub and earthworm had been
swept into it by the melting snow. And presently, what
should come drifting down with the current but a poor
little field-mouse, struggling desperately in a vain effort
to swim back to the shore. Once before our friend had
swallowed a mouse whole, just as you would take an
oyster from the half-shell, and he knew that they were
very nice, indeed. He made a rush for the unlucky little
animal, and in another second he would have had him;
but just then the big bully came swaggering up with an
air which seemed to say: “That’s my meat. You get
out of this!”

Our friend obeyed, the big fellow gave a leap and seized
the mouse, and then—his time had come. He fought
bravely, but he was fairly hooked, and in a few minutes
he lay out on the bank, gasping for breath, flopping[75]
wildly about, and fouling his beautiful sides with sand
and dirt. If he had understood English he might have
overheard an argument which immediately took place
between the angler and a girl, and which began something
like this:

“There!” in a triumphant tone; “who says mice
aren’t good bait? This is the biggest trout that’s been
caught in this stream for years.”

“Oh, George, don’t kill him! He’s so pretty! Put
him back in the water.”

“Put him back in the water? Well, I should say
not! What do you take me for?”

Evidently the girl took him for one who could be easily
influenced by the right person, for she kept up the argument,
and in the end she won her case. The trout was
tossed back into the stream, where he gave himself a
shake or two, to get rid of the sand, and then swam
away, apparently as well as ever. But girls don’t always
know what is good for trout. It would really have been
kinder if the angler had hit him over the head with the
butt of his fishing-rod, and then carried him home and
put him in the frying-pan. In his struggles a part of the
mucus had been rubbed from his body, and that always[76]
means trouble for a fish. A few days later our friend
met him again, and noticed that a curious growth had
appeared on his back and sides—a growth which bore a
faint resemblance to the bloom on a peach, and which
had taken the exact shape of the prints of the angler’s
fingers. The fungus had got him. He was dying, slowly
but surely, and within a week he turned over on his back
and drifted away down the stream. A black bear found
him whirling round and round in a little eddy under the
bank, and that was the end of him.

And so our friend became the King of the Trout
Stream.

You are not to suppose, however, that he paid very
much attention to his subjects, or that he was particularly
fond of having them about him and giving them orders.
On the contrary, he had become very hermit-like in his
habits. In his youth he had been fond of society, and he
and his companions had often roamed the stream in little
schools and bands, but of late years his tastes seemed to
have undergone a change, and he kept to himself and
lurked in the shady, sunless places till his skin grew
darker and darker, and he more and more resembled the
shadows in which he lived. His great delight was to[77]
watch from the depths of some cave-like hollow under an
overhanging bank until a star-gazer, or a herring, or a
minnow, or some other baby-eater came in sight, and
then to rush out and swallow him head first. He took
ample revenge on all those pesky little fishes for all that
they had done and tried to do to him and his brethren
in the early days. The truth is that every brook trout
is an Ishmaelite. The hand of every creature is against
him, from that of the dragon-fly larva to that of the man
with the latest invention in the way of patent fishing-tackle.
It is no wonder if he turns the tables on his
enemies whenever he has a chance, or even if he sometimes
goes so far, in his general ruthlessness, as to eat his
own offspring.

Yet, in spite of our friend’s moroseness and solitary
habits, there were certain times and seasons when he did
come more or less in contact with his inferiors. In late
spring and early summer he liked to sport for a while in
the swift rapids—perhaps to stretch his muscles after
the dull, quiet life of the winter-time, or possibly to
free himself from certain little insects which sometimes
fastened themselves to his body, and which, for lack of
hands, it was rather difficult to get rid of. Here he[78]
often met some of his subjects, and later, when the hot
weather came on, they all went to the spring-holes which
formed their summer resorts. And at such times he
never hesitated to take advantage of his superior size and
strength. He always picked out the coolest and most
comfortable places in the pools, and helped himself to the
choicest morsels of food; and the others took what was
left, without question. And when the summer was gone,
and the water grew cold and invigorating, and once more
he put on his wedding-garment and hurried away to the
gravelly shallows, how different was his conduct from
what it had been when he was a yearling! Then he was
only a hanger-on; now he selected his nest and his mate
to suit himself; and nobody ever dared to interfere.
Whether he ever again chose that beautiful little fish
from the hatchery, whom he had been so fond of when he
was a three-year-old, is a question which I would rather
not try to answer. Among all the vicissitudes, dangers,
and rivalries of life in a trout stream, a permanent marriage
seems to be almost an impossibility; and I fear
that the affections of a fish are not remarkable for depth
or constancy.

The Trout had altered in many ways besides his relations[79]
to his fellows. The curving lines of his body were
not quite as graceful as they had once been, and sometimes
he wore a rather lean and dilapidated look, especially
in the six months from November to May. His
tail was not as handsomely forked as when he was young,
but was nearly square across the end, and was beginning
to be a little frayed at the corners. His lower jaw had
grown out beyond the upper, and its extremity was
turned up in a wicked-looking hook which was almost a
disfigurement, but which he often found very useful in
hustling a younger trout out of the way. Even his complexion
had grown darker, as we have already seen. Altogether
he was less prepossessing than of old, but of
a much more formidable appearance, and the very look
of him was enough to scare a minnow out of a year’s
growth.

But, notwithstanding all changes, the two great interests
of his every-day life continued to be just what they
had always been—namely, to get enough to eat, and to
keep out of the way of his enemies; for enemies he still
had, and would have as long as he lived. The fly-fishermen,
with their feather-weight rods and their scientific
tackle, came every spring and summer; and only the wisdom[80]
born of experience kept him from falling into their
hands. Several times he met with an otter, and had to
run for his life. Once, a black bear, fishing for suckers,
came near catching a brook trout. And perhaps the
very closest of all his close calls came one day when some
river-drivers exploded a stick of dynamite in the water to
break up a log-jam. The trout was some distance up
the stream at the time, but the concussion stunned him
so that he floated at the surface, wrong side up, for
several minutes before his senses gradually came back.
That is a fish’s way of fainting.

His luck stayed by him, however, and none of these
things ever did him any serious harm. His reign proved
a long one, and as the years went by he came to exercise
a more and more autocratic sway over the smaller fry.
For in spite of his age he was still growing. A trout
has an advantage over a land animal in this, that he is
not obliged to use any of his food as fuel for keeping
himself warm. He can’t keep warm anyhow—not as
long as he lives in the water—and so he doesn’t try, but
devotes everything he eats to enlarging his body and repairing
wear and tear. If nothing happens to put a
stop to the process, he seems to be able to keep it up[81]
almost indefinitely. But the size of the stream in which
he lives appears to limit him to a certain extent. Probably
the largest trout stream in the world is the Nepigon,
and they say that seventeen-pounders were caught there
in the early days. Our friend’s native river was a rather
small one. In the course of time, however, he attained
a weight of very nearly three pounds, and I doubt if he
would ever have been much larger. Perhaps it was fitting
that his reign should end there.

But it seems a great pity that it could not have
ended in a more imposing manner. The last act of the
drama was so inglorious that I am almost ashamed to
tell it. He was the King of the Trout Stream; over
and over he had run Fate’s gauntlet, and escaped with his
body unharmed and his wits sharper than ever; he knew
the wiles of the fly-fishermen better than any other trout
in the river; and yet, alas! he fell a victim to a little
Indian boy with a piece of edging for a rod, coarse string
for a line, and salt pork for bait.

I’m sure it wouldn’t have happened if he had stayed at
home; but one spring he took it into his head to go
on an exploring expedition out into Lake Superior. I
understand that his cousins in the streams of eastern[82]
Canada sometimes visit salt water in somewhat the same
manner, and that they thereupon lose the bright trimmings
of their coats and become a plain silver-gray.
Superior did not affect our friend in that way, but something
worse happened to him—he lost his common-sense.
Perhaps his interest in his new surroundings was so great
that he forgot the lessons of wisdom and experience
which it had cost him so much to learn.

In the course of his wanderings he came to where a
school of perch were loafing in the shadow of a wharf;
and just as he pushed his way in among them, that little
white piece of fat pork sank slowly down through the
green water. It was something new to the trout; he
didn’t quite know what to make of it. But the perch
seemed to think it was good, and they would be sure to
eat it if he didn’t; and so, although the string was in
plain sight and ought to have been a sufficient warning,
he exercised his royal prerogative, shouldered those yellow-barred
plebeians out of the way, and took the tid-bit
for himself. It is too humiliating; let us draw a veil
over that closing scene.

The King of the Trout Stream had gone the way of
his fathers, and another reigned in his stead.

[83]

THE STRENUOUS LIFE OF A CANADA LYNX

[85]

He was some twenty-odd inches in height and about
three and a half feet in length, and had a most villanous
cast of countenance, a very wicked-looking set of teeth,
and claws that were two inches long and so heavy and[86]
strong and sharp that you could sometimes hear them
crunch into the bark when he climbed a tree. His long
hind legs, heavy buttocks, thick fore-limbs, and big,
clumsy-looking paws told of a magnificent set of muscles
pulling and sliding and hauling under his cloak.
She was nearly as large as he, and very much like him in
general appearance. Both of them wore long, thick fur,
of a lustrous steel-gray color, with paler shades underneath,
and darker trimmings along their back-bones and
up and down their legs. Their paws were big and broad
and furry, their tails were stubby and short, and they
wore heavy, grizzled whiskers on the sides of their jaws
and mustachios under their noses, while from the tips
of their ears rose tassels of stiff, dark hairs that had an
uncommonly jaunty effect. Altogether they looked very
fierce and imposing and war-like—perhaps rather more
so than was justified by their actual prowess. So it was
not surprising that they took to each other. Perhaps he
wasn’t really quite as heroic as he appeared, but that’s
not uncommon among other lovers besides those belonging
to the lynx tribe, and what difference did it make,
anyhow, as long as she didn’t know it?

That winter was a hard one. The cold was intense,[87]
the snow was very deep, and the storms came often.
Spruce hens and partridges were scarce, even rabbits were
hard to find, and sometimes it seemed to the two lynxes
as if they were the only animals left in the woods. Except
the deer. There were always plenty of deer down
in the cedar swamp, and their tracks were as plain as a
lumberman’s logging road. But although the lynxes
sometimes killed and ate young fawns in the summertime,
they seldom tasted venison in the winter. It was
well for them that they had each other, for when one
failed in the hunt the other sometimes succeeded, yet I
cannot help thinking that the old male, especially, might
perhaps have been of more use to his mate if he had not
confined his hunting so entirely to the smaller animals.
More than once he sat on a branch of a tree and watched
a buck or doe go by, and his claws twitched and his eyes
blazed, and he fairly trembled with eagerness and excitement
as he saw the big gray creature pass, all unconscious,
beneath his perch. Splendidly armed as he was,
it would seem as though he must have succeeded if only
he had jumped and risked a tussle. But he never tried
it. I suppose he was afraid. And yet—such were the
contradictions of his nature—one dark night he trotted[88]
half a mile after a shanty-boy who was going home with
a haunch of venison over his shoulder, and was just gathering
himself for a spring, intending to leap on him from
behind, when another man appeared. Two against one
was not fair, he thought, and he gave it up and beat a
retreat without either of them seeing him. They found
his footprints the next morning in their snow-shoe
tracks, and wondered how far behind them he had been.
I don’t know whether it was a vein of real courage that
nerved him up to doing such a foolhardy thing as to
follow a man with the intention of attacking him, or
whether it was simply a case of recklessness. The probability
is, however, that he was hungrier than usual, and
that the smell of the warm blood made him forget everything
else. Anyhow, he had a pretty close call, for the
shanty-boy had a revolver in his pocket.

Aside from any question of heroism, I am afraid that
he was not really as wise and discriminating as he looked.
I have an idea that when Nature manufactured him she
thought he did not need as much wisdom or as many wits
as some of the other people of the woods, inasmuch as he
was larger and stronger and better armed than most of
them. Except possibly the bear, who was altogether too[89]
easy-going to molest him, there was not one of the animals
that could thrash him, and they all knew it and let
him alone. You can often manage very well without
brains if only you have the necessary teeth and muscle
and claws; and the old lynx had them, without a doubt.
But I fear that Nature, in adapting a wild animal to his
environment, now and then forgets to allow for the
human element in the problem. Brains are a good thing
to have, after all. Even to a lynx the time is pretty
sure to come, sooner or later, when he needs them in his
business. Your fellow-citizens of the woods may treat
you with all due respect, but the trapper won’t, and he’ll
get you if you don’t watch out.

One day he found some more snow-shoe tracks, just like
those that the shanty-boy had left, and instead of running
away, as he ought to have done, and as most of the
animals would have had sense enough to do, he followed
them up to see where they led. He wasn’t particularly
hungry that day, and there was absolutely no excuse for
what he did. It certainly wasn’t bravery that inspired
him, for he had not the least idea of attacking anyone.
It was simply a case of foolish curiosity. He followed
the trail a long way, not walking directly in it, but keeping[90]
just a little to one side, wallowing heavily as he went,
for a foot and a half of light, fluffy snow had fallen the
day before, and the walking was very bad. Presently he
caught sight of a little piece of scarlet cloth fastened to a
stick that stood upright in a drift. It ought to have
been another warning to him, but it only roused his curiosity
to a still higher pitch, as the trapper knew it would.
He sat down in the snow and considered. The thing
didn’t really look as if it were good to eat, and yet it
might be. The only way to find out would be to go up
to it and taste it. But, eatable or not, such a bright bit
of color was certainly very attractive to the eye. You
would think so yourself if you hadn’t seen anything scarlet
since last summer’s wild-flowers faded. Finally, he
got up and walked slowly toward it, and the first thing
he knew a steel trap had him by the right foreleg.

The way of the foolish is sometimes as hard as that
of the transgressor. For a few minutes he was the very
maddest cat in all the Great Tahquamenon Swamp, and he
yelled and howled and caterwauled at the top of his voice,
and jumped and tore around as if he was crazy. But,
of course, that sort of thing did him no good, and after
a while he quieted down and took things a little more[91]
calmly. Instead of being made fast to a tree, the trap
was bound by a short chain to a heavy wooden clog, and
he found that by pulling with all his might he could drag
it at a snail’s pace through the snow. So off he went on
three legs, hauling the trap and clog by the fourth, with
the blood oozing out around the steel jaws and leaving a
line of bright crimson stains behind him. The strain on
his foot hurt him cruelly, but a great fear was in his
heart, and he knew that he must go away or die. So he
pushed on, hour after hour, stopping now and then to
rest for a few minutes in a thicket of cedar or hemlock,
but soon gathering his strength for another effort. How
he growled and snarled with rage and pain, and how his
great eyes flamed as he looked ahead to see what was
before him, or back along his trail to know if the trapper
was coming!

It was a terrible journey that he made that night, and
the hours dragged by slow as his pace and heavy as his
clog. He was heading toward the hollow tree by the
Glimmerglass that he and his mate called home, but he
had not made more than half the distance, and his
strength was nearly gone. Half-way between midnight
and dawn he reached the edge of a steep and narrow[92]
gully that lay straight across his path. The moon had
risen some time before, and the white slopes gleamed and
shone in the frosty light, all the whiter by contrast with
the few bushes and trees that were scattered up and down
the little valley. The lynx stood on the brink and
studied the proposition before him. It would be hard,
hard work to climb the farther side, dragging that heavy
clog, but at least it ought to be easy going down. He
scrambled over the edge, hauling the clog after him till it
began to roll of its own accord. The chain slackened,
and he leaped forward. It was good to be able to jump
again. But he jumped too far, or tried to, and the chain
tightened with a jerk that brought him down head-first
in the snow. Before he could recover himself the clog
shot past him, and the chain jerked again and sent him
heels over head. And then cat, trap, and clog all went
rolling over and over down the slope, and landed in a
heap at the bottom. All the breath and the spirit were
knocked out of him, and for a long time he could do
nothing but lie still in the snow, trembling with weakness
and pain, and moaning miserably. It must have
been half an hour before he could pull himself together
again, and then, just as he was about to begin the climb[93]
up the far side of the gully, he suddenly discovered that
he was no longer alone. Off to the left, among some
thick bushes, he saw the lurking form of a timber-wolf.
He looked to the right, and there was another. Behind
him was a third, and he thought he saw several others
still farther away, slinking from bush to bush, and gradually
drawing nearer. Ordinarily they would hardly have
dreamed of tackling him, and, if they had mustered up
sufficient courage to attempt to overpower him by mere
force of numbers, he would simply have climbed a tree
and laughed at them. But now it was different.

The lynx cowered down in the snow and seemed to
shrink to half his normal size; and then, as all the horror
and the hopelessness of it came over him, he lifted up his
voice in such a cry of abject fear, such a wail of utter
agony and despair, as even the Great Tahquamenon
Swamp had very seldom heard. I suppose that he had
killed and eaten hundreds of smaller animals in his time,
but I doubt if any of his victims ever suffered as he did.
Most of them were taken unawares, and were killed and
eaten almost before they knew what was coming; but he
had to lie still and see his enemies slowly closing in upon
him, knowing all the time that he could not fight to any[94]
advantage, and that to fly was utterly impossible. But
when the last moment arrived he must have braced up
and given a good account of himself. At least that was
what the trapper decided when he came a few hours later
to look for his trap. The lynx was gone—not even a
broken bone of him was left—but there in the trodden
and blood-stained snow was the record of an awful
struggle. There must have been something heroic
about him, after all.

For the rest of the winter his widow had to hunt alone.
This was not such a great hardship in itself, for they
had frequently gone out separately on their marauding
expeditions—more often, perhaps, than they had gone
together. But now there was never anyone to curl up
beside her in the hollow tree and help her keep warm, or
to share his kill with her when her own was unsuccessful.
And when the spring should come and bring her a family
of kittens, she would have to take on her own shoulders
the whole burden of parental responsibility. Or, rather,
the burden was already there, for if she did not find
enough meat to keep herself in good health the babies
would be weak and wizened and unpromising, with small
chance of growing up to be a credit to her or a satisfaction[95]
to themselves. So she hunted night and day, and,
on the whole, with very good results. To tell the truth,
I think she was rather more skilful in the chase than her
mate had been, and this seems to be a not uncommon
state of things in cat families. Perhaps feminine fineness
of instinct and lightness of tread are better adapted to
the still-hunt than the greater clumsiness and awkwardness
of masculinity. Or, is there something deeper than
that? Has something whispered to these savage mothers
that on their success depends more than their own lives,
and that it is their sacred duty to kill, kill, kill? However
that may be, she proved herself a mighty huntress
before the Lord. Her eye was keen, and her foot was
sure, and she made terrible havoc among the rabbits and
partridges.

And yet there were times when even she was hungry
and tired and disheartened. Once, on a clear, keen, cold
winter night when all the great white world seemed
frozen to death, she serenaded a land-looker who had
made his bed in a deserted lumber-camp and was trying
to sleep. She had eaten almost nothing for several days,
and she knew that her strength was ebbing. That very
evening she had fallen short in a flying leap at a rabbit,[96]
and had seen him dive head-first into his burrow, safe by
the merest fraction of an inch. She had fairly screeched
with rage and disappointment, and as the hours went by
and she found no other game, she grew so blue and discouraged
that she really couldn’t contain herself any
longer. Perhaps it did her good to have a cry. For
two hours the land-looker lay in his bunk and listened
to a wailing that made his heart fairly sink within him.
Now it was a piercing scream, now it was a sob, and now
it died away in a low moan, only to rise again, wilder
and more agonized than ever. He knew without a doubt
that it was only some kind of a cat—knew it just as well
as he knew that his compass needle pointed north. Yet
there had been times in his land-looking experience when
he had been ready to swear that the needle was pointing
south-southeast; and to-night, in spite of his certain
knowledge that the voice he heard was that of a lynx or
a wild-cat or cougar, he couldn’t help being almost dead
sure that it came from a woman in distress, there was in
it such a note of human anguish and despair. Twice he
got half-way out of bed to go to her assistance, and then
lay down again and called himself a fool. At last he
could stand it no longer, and taking a burning brand[97]
from the broken stove that stood in the centre of the
room, he went to the door and looked out. The great
arc-light of the moon had checkered the snow-crust with
inky shadows, and patches of dazzling white. The cold
air struck him like needles, and he said to himself that it
was no wonder that either a cat or a woman should cry
if she had to stay out in the snow on such a night. The
moaning and wailing ceased as he opened the door, but
now two round spots of flame shone out of a black
shadow and stared at him unwinkingly. The lynx’s
pupils were wide open, and the golden-yellow tapeta in
the backs of her eyeballs were glowing like incandescent
lamps. It was no woman. No human eyes could ever
shine like that. The land-looker threw the brand with
all his might; an ugly snarl came from the shadow, and
he saw a big gray animal go tearing away across the
hard, smooth crust in a curious kind of gallop, taking
three or four yards at a bound, coming down on all
four feet at once, and spring forward again as if she
was made of rubber. He shut the door and went back
to bed.

That was the end of the concert, and, as it turned out,
it was also the end of the lynx’s troubles, at least for the[98]
time being. Half an hour later, as she was loping along
in the moonlight, she thought she heard a faint sound
from beneath her feet. She stood still to listen, and the
next minute she was sure. During the last heavy snow-storm
three partridges had dived into a drift for shelter
from the wind and the cold, and such a thick, hard crust
had formed over their heads that they had not been able
to get out again. She resurrected them in short order
and reinterred them after a fashion of her own, and then
she went home to her hollow tree and slept the sleep of
those who have done what Nature tells them to, and
whose consciences are clear and whose stomachs full.

That was her nearest approach to starvation. She
never was quite so hungry again, and in the early spring
she had a great piece of luck. Not very far from her
hollow tree she met a buck that had been mortally
wounded by a hunter. He had had strength enough to
run away, and to throw his pursuer off his track, but
there was very little fight left in him. In such a case as
this she was quite ready to attack, and it did not take
her long to finish him. Probably it was a merciful release,
for he had suffered greatly in the last few days.
Fortunately no wolves or other large animals found him,[99]
and he gave her meat till after the kittens had come and
she had begun to grow well and strong again.

The kittens were a great success—two of the finest she
had ever had, and she had had many. But at first, of
course, they were rather insignificant-looking—just two
little balls of reddish-brown fur that turned over once in
a while and mewed for their dinner. Some of the scientific
men say that a new-born baby has no mind, but
only a blank something that appears to be capable of
receiving and retaining impressions, and that may in certain
cases have tendencies. There is reason for thinking
that the baby lynxes had tendencies. But imagine, if you
can, what their first impressions were like. And remember
that they were blind, and that if their ears heard
sounds they certainly did not comprehend them. Sometimes
they were cold and hungry and lonesome, and that
was an impression of the wrong sort. They did not
know what the trouble was, but something was the matter,
that was certain, and they cried about it, like other
babies. Then would come a great, warm, comforting
presence, and all would be right again; and that was a
very pleasant impression, indeed. I don’t suppose they
knew exactly what had been done to them. Probably[100]
they were not definitely aware that their empty stomachs
had been filled, or that their shrinking, shivering little
bodies were snuggled down in somebody’s thick fur coat,
or that somebody’s warm red tongue was licking and
stroking and caressing them. Much less could they have
known how that big, strong, comforting somebody came
to be there, or how many harmless and guiltless little
lives had been snuffed out to give her life and to enable
her to give it to them. But they knew that all was well
with them, and that everything was just as it should be—and
they took another nap.

“The hole was suddenly darkened, and a round, hairy face looked in.”

By and by they began to look about for impressions,
and were no longer content with lying still and taking
only what came to them. They seemed to acquire a
mental appetite for impressions that was almost as ravenous
as their stomachs’ appetite for milk, and their weak
little legs were forced to lift their squat little bodies and
carry them on exploring expeditions around the inside of
the hollow tree, where they bumped their heads against
the walls, and stumbled and fell down over the inequalities
of the floor. They got a good many impressions
during these excursions, and some of them were mental
and some were physical. And sometimes they explored[101]
their mother, and went scrambling and sprawling all over
her, probably getting about as well acquainted with her
as it is possible to be with a person whom one has never
seen. For their eyes were still closed, and they must
have known her only as a big, kind, loving, furry thing,
that fed them, and warmed them, and licked them, and
made them feel good, and yet was almost as vague and
indefinite as something in a dream. But the hour came
at last when for the first time they saw the light of day
shining in through the hole in the side of their tree.
And while they were looking at it—and probably blinking
at it—a footstep sounded outside, the hole was suddenly
darkened, and a round, hairy face looked in—a
face with big, unwinking eyes, pointed, tufted ears, and
a thick whisker brushed back from under its chin. Do
you suppose they recognized their mother? I don’t believe
they did. But when she jumped in beside them,
then they knew her, and the impression they gained that
day was one of the most wonderful of all.

In looks, these kittens of the woods were not so very
different from those of the backyard, except that they
were bigger and perhaps a little clumsier, and that their
paws were very large, and their tails very short and[102]
stubby. They grew stronger as the days went on, and
their legs did not wobble quite so much when they went
travelling around the inside of the tree. And they
learned to use their ears as well as their eyes. They
knew what their mother’s step meant at the entrance,
and they liked to hear her purr.

Other sounds there were which they did not understand
so well, and to most of which they gave little heed—the
scream of the rabbit when the big gray cat leaps
on him from behind a bush; the scolding of the red
squirrel, disturbed and angry at the sight, and fearful
that he may be the next victim; the bark of the fox; the
rasping of the porcupine’s teeth; and oftenest of all the
pleasant rustling and whispering of the trees, for by this
time the sun and the south wind had come back and done
their work, and the voice of the leaves was heard in the
land. All these noises of the woods, and many others
besides, came to them from outside the walls of the tree,
from a vast, mysterious region of which as yet they knew
nothing except that their mother often went there. She
was beginning to think that they were big enough and
old enough to learn something more about it, and so one
day she led them out of the hole, and they saw the sunshine,[103]
and the blue of the sky, and the green of the trees,
and the whiteness of the sailing clouds, and the beauty of
the Glimmerglass. But I don’t think they appreciated
the wonder and the glory of it all, or paid as much attention
to it as they ought. They were too much interested
in making their legs work properly, for their knees
were still rather weak, and were apt to give out all of a
sudden, and to let a fellow sit down when he didn’t want
to. And the dry leaves and little sticks kept sliding
around under one’s feet so that one never knew what was
going to happen next. It was very different from the hollow
tree, and they were glad when their mother picked
them up one at a time by the back of the neck, carried
them home, gave them their supper, and told them to lie
still and take a nap while she went after another rabbit.

But they had really done very well, considering that it
was their first day out. One of them in particular was
very smart and precocious, and she had taken much
pleasure in watching the independent way in which he
went staggering about, looking for impressions. And
the other was not far behind him. Her long hours of
still-hunting had brought their rich reward, and her
babies were all that she could ask.[104]

She was in the habit of occasionally bringing something
home for them to play with—a wood-mouse, perhaps,
or a squirrel, or a partridge, or even a larger animal;
and they played with it with a vengeance, shaking
and worrying it, and spitting and growling and snarling
over it in the most approved fashion. And you should
have seen them the first time they saw their mother catch
a rabbit. They did not try to help her, for she had told
them not to, but they watched her as if it was a matter
of life and death—as, indeed, it was, but not to them.
The rabbit was nibbling some tender young sprouts.
The old lynx crept up behind him very quietly and
stealthily, and the kittens’ eyes stuck out farther and
farther as they saw her gradually work up within leaping
distance. They nearly jumped out of their skins with
excitement when at last she gave a bound and landed
with both forepaws on the middle of his back. And
when the rabbit screamed out in his fright and pain, they
could not contain themselves any longer, but rushed
in and helped finish him. They seemed to understand
the game as perfectly as if they had been practising it
for years. I suppose that was where their tendencies
came in.[105]

A few days later they had another experience—or at
least one of them did. Their mother happened to see
two little wood-mice run under a small, half-decayed log,
and she put her forefeet against it and rolled it half-way
over; and then, while she held it there, the larger Kitten—the
one who had made the better record the day they
first left the den—thrust his paw under and grabbed one
of them. The other mouse got away, but I don’t think
the Kitten cared very much. He had made his first kill,
and that was glory enough for one day.

From wood-mice the kittens progressed to chipmunks,
and from them to larger game. With use and exercise
their soft baby muscles grew hard and strong, and it was
not long before they were able to follow the old lynx
almost anywhere, to the tops of the tallest trees, over
the roughest ground, and through the densest thickets.
And they learned other things besides how to walk and
climb and hunt. Their mother was a good teacher and
a rather rigid disciplinarian, and very early in life they
were taught that they must obey promptly and without
question, and that on certain occasions it was absolutely
necessary to keep perfectly still and not make the slightest
sound. For instance, there was the time when the[106]
whole family lay sprawled out on a limb of a tree, fifteen
or twenty feet up from the ground, and watched the
land-looker go by with his half-axe over his shoulder, his
compass in his hand, and a note-book sticking out of his
pocket. They were so motionless, and the grayish color
of their fur matched so well with the bark of the tree,
that he never saw them, although for a moment they
were right over his head, and could have leaped to his
shoulders as easily as not.

In short, the kittens were learning to take care of
themselves, and it was well that they were, for one day
their mother was taken from them in a strange, sad way,
and there was nothing they could do but cry, and try to
follow her, and at last see her pass out of sight, still
looking back and calling to them pitifully. It was the
river that carried her off, and it was a floating saw-log
that she rode upon, an unwilling passenger. The trouble
began with a steel trap, just as it did in their father’s
case. Traps are not nearly as much to be feared in summer
or early fall as in winter, for the simple reason that
one’s fur is not as valuable in warm weather as in cold.
The lynx’s, for instance, was considerably shorter and
thinner than it had been in the preceding December,[107]
when she and her mate first met, and it had taken on a
reddish tinge, as if the steel had begun to rust a trifle.
But the killing machines are to be found occasionally
at all seasons of the year, and somebody had set this one
down by the edge of the water—not the Glimmerglass,
but a branch of the Tahquamenon River—and had
chained it to a log that had been hung up in last spring’s
drive. When she first felt its grip on her leg she yelled
and tore around just as her mate had done, while the kittens
looked on in wonder and amazement. They had seen
their mother in many moods, but never in one like this.
But by and by she grew weary, and a little later it began
to rain. She was soon soaking wet, and as the hours
dragged on every ounce of courage and gumption seemed
to ooze out of her. If the trapper had come then he
would have found her very meek and limp. Possibly
she would have been ready to fight him for her children’s
sakes, but nothing else could have nerved her to it. But
she was not put to any such test; the trapper did not
come.

It rained very hard, and it rained very long. In fact
it had been raining most of the time for two or three
days before the lynx found the trap, and in a few more[108]
hours the Great Tahquamenon Swamp was as full of
water as a soaked sponge, and the river was rising
rapidly. The lynx was soon lying in a puddle, and to
get out of it she climbed upon the log and stretched herself
out on the wet, brown bark. Still the river rose,
and by and by the log began to stir in its bed, as if it
were thinking of renewing its voyage. At last, when she
had been there nearly twenty-four hours, and was faint
with hunger, as well as cold and wet, it quietly swung
out into the current and drifted away down the stream.
She was an excellent swimmer, and she promptly jumped
overboard and tried to reach the shore, but of course the
chain put a stop to that. Weakened by fasting, and
borne down by the weight of the trap, she came very
near drowning before she could scramble up again over
the end of the log and seat herself amidships.

The kittens were foraging among the bushes, but she
called to them in a tone which told them plainly enough
that some new trouble had befallen her, and they hurried
down to the water’s edge, and stood there, mewing
piteously. She implored them to follow her, and after
much persuasion the bigger and bolder of the two
plunged bravely in. But he didn’t get very far. It[109]
was very cold and very wet, and he wasn’t used to swimming.
Besides, the water got into his nose and made
him sneeze, which distracted his attention so that for a
moment he forgot all about his mother, and just turned
around and hustled back to the shore as fast as he could
go. After that he, contented himself with following
along the bank and keeping as near her as he could.
Once the log drifted in so close that she thought she
could jump ashore, and the Kitten watched eagerly as she
gathered herself for the spring. But the chain was too
short, and she fell into the water. Her forepaw just
grazed the grass-tuft where the Kitten was standing, and
for an instant she felt the blades slipping between her
toes; but the next moment she was swimming for the log
again, and the Kitten was mewing his sympathy at the
top of his voice.

They journeyed on for nearly an hour longer, she on
her prison-ship, and he on land; and then, before either
of them knew just what had happened, the little tributary
had emptied itself into the main stream of the Tahquamenon,
and they suddenly realized that they were
much farther apart than they had been at any time before.
This new river was several times as broad as the[110]
one on which the voyage had begun, and the wind was
steadily carrying her away from the shore, while the current
bore her resistlessly on in its long, slow voyage to
Lake Superior. She was still calling to him, but her
voice was growing fainter and fainter in the distance,
and so, at last, she passed out of his sight and hearing
forever.

“He was a very presentable young lynx.”

And then, for the first time, he missed his brother.
The other kitten had always been a trifle the slower of
the two, and in some way he had dropped behind. Our
friend was alone in the world.

But the same river that had carried his mother away
brought him a little comfort in his desolation, for down
by the water’s edge, cast up on the sand by a circling
eddy, he found a dead sucker. He ate it with relish, and
felt better in spite of himself. It made a very large
meal for a lynx of his size, and by the time he had finished
it he began to be drowsy, so he picked out the
driest spot he could find, under the thick branches of a
large hemlock, and curled himself up on the brown
needles and went to sleep.

The next day he had to hustle for a living, and the
next it was the same, and the next, and the next. As[111]
the weeks and the months went by there was every indication
that life would be little else than one long hustle—or
perhaps a short one—and in spite of all he could do
there were times when he was very near the end of the
chapter. But his mother’s lessons stood him in good
stead, and he was exceedingly well armed for the chase.
It would have been hard to find in all the woods any
teeth better adapted than his to the work of pulling a
fellow-creature to pieces. In front, on both the upper
and lower jaws, were the chisel-shaped incisors. Flanking
them were the canines, very long and slender, and
very sharply pointed, thrusting themselves into the meat
like the tines of a carving-fork, and tearing it away in
great shreds. And back of the canines were other teeth
that were still larger, but shorter and broader, and
shaped more like notched knife-blades. Those of the
lower jaw worked inside those of the upper, like shears,
and they were very handy for cutting the large chunks
into pieces small enough to go down his throat. By the
time he got through with a partridge there was not much
left of it but a puddle of brown feathers. His claws, too,
were very long and white, and very wickedly curved; and
before starting out on a hunt he would often get up on[112]
his hind legs and sharpen those of his forefeet on a tree-trunk,
just as your house-cat sharpens hers on the leg of
the kitchen-table. When he wasn’t using them he kept
them hidden between his toes, so that they would not be
constantly catching and breaking on roots and things;
but all he had to do when he wanted them was to pull
certain muscles, and out they came, ready to scratch and
tear to his heart’s content. They were not by any means
full grown as yet, but they bade fair to equal his father’s
some day. He was warmly and comfortably clothed, of
course, and along his sides and flanks the hair hung especially
thick and long, to protect his body when he was
obliged to wade through light, fluffy snow. When there
was a crust he didn’t need it, for his paws were so big
and broad and hairy that at such times they bore him up
almost as well as if they had been two pairs of snow-shoes.

But, well armed, well clad, and well shod though he
was, it was fortunate for the Kitten that his first winter
was a mild one—mild, that is, for the Glimmerglass
country. Otherwise things might have gone very hard
with him, and they were none too easy as it was. There
were days when he was even hungrier than his mother[113]
had been the night she serenaded the land-looker, and it
was on one of these occasions that he found a porcupine
in a tree and tried to make a meal of him. That was
a memorable experience. The porky was sitting in a
crotch, doing nothing in particular, and when the Kitten
approached he simply put his nose down and his quills
up. The Kitten spat at him contemptuously, but without
any apparent effect. Then he put out a big forepaw
and tapped him lightly on the forehead. The porcupine
flipped his tail, and the Kitten jumped back, and
spat and hissed harder than ever. He didn’t quite know
what to make of this singular-looking creature, but he
was young and rash, besides being awfully, awfully hungry,
and in another minute he pitched in.

The next thing they knew, the porcupine had dropped
to the ground, where he lit in a snow-bank, and presently
picked himself up and waddled off to another tree, while
the Kitten—well, the Kitten just sat in the crotch and
cried as hard as ever he could cry. There were quills in
his nose, and quills in his side, and quills in both his forepaws;
and every motion was agony. He himself never
knew exactly how he got rid of them all, so of course I
can’t tell you. A few of those that were caught only by[114]
their very tips may possibly have dropped out, but it is
probable that most of them broke off and left their points
to work deeper and deeper into the flesh until the skin
finally closed over them and they disappeared. I have no
doubt that pieces of those quills are still wandering about
in various parts of his anatomy, like the quart of lead
that “Little Bobs” carries around with him, according to
Mr. Kipling. It was weeks before he ceased to feel the
pain of them.

For several days after this mishap it was impossible for
him to hunt, and he would certainly have starved to
death if it had not been for a cougar who providentially
came to the Glimmerglass on a short visit. The Kitten
found his tracks in the snow the very next day, and cautiously
followed them up, limping as he went, to see what
the big fellow had been doing. For a mile or more the
large, round, shapeless footprints—very much like his
own, but on a bigger scale—were spaced so regularly that
it was evident the cougar had been simply walking along at
a very leisurely gait, with nothing to disturb his frame of
mind. But after a while the record showed a remarkable
change. The footprints were only a few inches apart,
and his cougarship had carried himself so low that his[115]
body had dragged in the snow and left a deep furrow
behind. The Kitten knew what that meant. He had
been there himself, though not after the same kind of
prey. And then the trail stopped entirely, and for a
space the snow lay fresh and virgin and untrodden.
But twenty feet away was the spot where the cougar had
come down on all-fours, only to leap forward again like a
ricochetting cannon-ball; and twenty-five feet farther lay
the greater part of the carcass of a deer.

The Kitten stuffed himself as full as he could hold, and
then climbed a tree and watched. About midnight the
cougar appeared, and after he had eaten his fill and gone
away again the Kitten slipped down and ate some more.
He was making up for lost time. For four successive
nights the cougar came and feasted on venison, but after
that the Kitten never saw him or heard of him again.
There was still a goodly quantity of meat left, and it
seems somewhat curious that he did not return for it, but
he was a stranger in those parts, and it is probable that
he went back to his old haunts, up toward Whitefish
Point, perhaps, or the Grand Sable. Anyhow, it was
very nice for the Kitten, for that deer kept him in provisions
until he was able to take up hunting once more.[116]

He had one rather exciting experience during this
period. One day, just as he was finishing a very enjoyable
meal of venison tenderloin, he heard the tramp of
snow-shoes on the crust, and in a moment more that same
land-looker came pacing down a section line and halted
squarely in front of him. Now there are trappers who
say that a Canada lynx is a fool and a coward, that he
will run from a small dog, and that he makes his living
entirely by preying on animals that are weaker and more
poorly armed than he. I admit, of course, that the majority
of lynxes do not go ramming around the woods with
chips on their shoulders, looking for hunters armed with
bowie-knives and repeating rifles. You wouldn’t, either—not
as long as there were rabbits to be had for the stalking.
But on this occasion the Kitten’s conduct certainly
savored of recklessness, if not of real bravery. Being entirely
unacquainted with the land-looking profession, he
naturally supposed that the man had come for his deer.
And he didn’t propose to let him have it. He considered
that that venison belonged to him, and he took his stand
on the carcass, laid his ears back, showed his white teeth,
made his eyes blaze, and spit and growled and snarled
defiantly. The land-looker didn’t quite know what to[117]
do. His section line lay straight across the deer’s body,
and he did not want to leave it for fear of confusing his
reckoning, but the Kitten, though only half grown, looked
uncommonly business-like. He had no gun, nor even a
revolver, for he was hunting for pine, not fresh meat.
He had left his half-axe in camp, and when he felt in
his pocket for his jack-knife it was not there. Then he
looked about for a club. He had been told that lynxes
always had very thin skulls, and that a light blow on the
back of the head was enough to kill the biggest and fiercest
of them, let alone a kitten. But he couldn’t even
find a stick that would answer his purpose.

“Well,” he said, when they had stared at each other a
minute or two longer without coming to any understanding,
“I suppose if you won’t turn out for me, I’ll have
to turn out for you”; and he made a careful circuit at a
respectful distance, picked up his line again, and went on
his way.

The winter dragged on very slowly, with many ups and
downs, but it was gone at last. Summer was easier, if
only because he was not obliged to use up any of his
vitality in keeping warm. Sometimes, indeed, he was
really too warm for comfort, so he presently changed his[118]
coat and put on a thinner one. People like to talk about
the coolness of the deep woods, but the truth is that
there isn’t any place much hotter and stuffier than a dense
growth of timber, where the wind never comes, and where
the air is heavy and still. And then there are the windfalls
and the old burnings, where the sun beats fiercely
down among the fallen trees till the blackened soil is hot
as a city pavement, and where dead trunks and half-burned
logs lie thrown together in the wildest confusion—places
which are almost impassable for men, and which
even the land-lookers avoid whenever they can, but which
a cat will thread as readily as the locomotive follows the
rails. These were the localities which the Kitten was
most fond of frequenting, and here his youth slipped
rapidly away. He was fast becoming an adult lynx.

The summer passed, and half the autumn; the first
snow came and went, and again the Kitten put on his
winter coat of gray, with the white underneath, and the
dark trimmings up and down his legs and along his back.
What with his mustachios, and his whiskers, and the
tassels on his ears, he was a very presentable young lynx.
It would be many years before he could hope to be as
large and powerful as his father, but, nevertheless, he was[119]
making remarkably good progress. And the time was at
hand when he would need both his good looks and his
muscle.

Since his mother had left him he had seen only two or
three lynxes, and those were all much older and larger
than he, and not well suited to be his companions. But
history repeats itself. One Indian-summer afternoon he
was tramping along the northern bank of the Glimmerglass,
just as his father had done two years before, and
as he rounded a bend in the path he came face to face
with someone who was enough like him to have been his
twin sister. And they did as his parents had done, stood
still for a minute or two and looked at each other as if
they had just found out what they were made for. After
all, life is something more than hustling for a living, even
in the woods.

But just then something else happened, and another
ruling passion came into play—the old instinct of the
chase, which neither of them could very long forget. A
faint “Quack, quack, quack,” came up from the lake, and
they crept to the edge of the bank, side by side, and
looked down. Above them the trees stood dreamily
motionless in the mellow sunshine. Below was a steep[120]
slope of ten or fifteen feet; beyond it a tiny strip of
sandy beach, and then the quiet water. A squadron of
ducks, on their way from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf,
had taken stop-over checks for the Glimmerglass; and
now they came loitering along through the dead bulrushes,
murmuring gently, in soft, mild voices, of delicious
minnows and snails, and pausing a moment now
and then to put their heads under and dabble in the mud
for some particularly choice morsel. The lynxes crouched
and waited, while their stubby tails twitched nervously,
their long, narrow pupils grew still narrower, and their
paws fumbled about among the dry pine-needles, feeling
for the very best footing for the flying leap. The ducks
came on, still prattling pleasantly over their own private
affairs. Closer and closer they swam, without a thought
of death waiting for them at the top of the bank, and
suddenly four splendid sets of muscles jerked like bowstrings,
four long hind-legs straightened with a mighty
thrust and shove, and two big gray creatures shot out
from the brink and came sailing down through the air
with their heads up, their tails on end, their eyes blazing,
and their forepaws stretched out to grab the nearest
unhappy duck. The flock broke up with frightened cries[121]
and a wonderful whirring of wings, and in a moment
more they were far away and going like the very wind.

“They both stood still and looked at each other.”

But two of its members stayed behind, and presently
the lynxes waded out on the beach and sat down to eat
their supper together. They talked as much over that
meal as the ducks had over theirs, but the lynx language
is very different from that of the water-fowl. Instead of
soft, gentle murmurings there were low growls and snarls
as the long, white claws and teeth tore the warm red
flesh from the bones. It could hardly have been a pleasant
conversation to anyone but themselves, but I suppose
they enjoyed it as much as the choicest repartee.
In truth they had good reason to be satisfied and contented
with themselves and each other, and with what
they had just done, for not every flying leap is so successful,
and not every duck is as plump and juicy as the two
that they were discussing. So they talked on in angry,
threatening tones, that sounded like quarrelling, but that
really meant only a fierce, savage kind of pleasure; and
when the meal was ended, and the very last shred of duck-flesh
had disappeared, they washed their faces, and purred,
and lay still a while to visit and get acquainted.

There were many other meetings during the weeks[122]
that followed—some under as pleasant circumstances as
the first, and some not. Perhaps the best were those of
the clear, sharp days of early winter, when the sky was
blue, and the sunshine was bright, and a thin carpet of
fine, dry snow covered the floor of the forest. It was
cold, of course; but they were young and strong and
healthy, and their fur was thick and warm, like the garments
of a Canadian girl. The keen air set the live
blood leaping and dancing, and they frisked and frolicked,
and romped and played, and rolled each other over and
over in the snow, and were as wildly and deliciously happy
as it is ever given to two animals to be.

It was too good to last long without some kind of an
interruption, and one glorious winter evening, when the
full moon was flooding the woods with the white light
that brings a touch of madness, a third young lynx came
upon the scene. And then there was trouble. The
Kitten’s new friend sat back in the bushes and looked on,
while he and his rival squatted face to face in the snow
and sassed each other to the utmost limits of the lynx
vocabulary, their voices rising and falling in a hideous
duet, and their eyes gleaming and glowing with a pale,
yellow-green fire. Presently there was a rush, and the[123]
fur began to fly. The snow flew, too; and the woods
rang and rang again with yelling and caterwauling, and
spitting and swearing, and all manner of abuse. The
rabbits heard it, and trembled; and the partridges, down
in the cedar swamp, glanced furtively over their shoulders
and were glad it was no nearer. They bit and
scratched and clawed like two little devils, and the onlooker
in the bushes must have felt a thrill of pride over
the strenuous way in which they strove for her favors.
First one was on top, and then the other. Now our
Kitten had his rival by the ears, and now by the tail.
One minute heads, legs, and bodies were all mixed up in
such a snarl that it seemed as if they could never be untangled,
and the next they backed off just long enough
to catch their breath, and then flew at each other’s
throats more savagely than ever. It was really more
difficult than you would suppose for either of them to get
a good hold of the other, partly because their fur was so
thick, and partly because Nature had purposely made
their skins very loose, with an eye to just such performances
as this. But they managed to do a good deal of
damage, nevertheless; and in the end the pretender was
thoroughly whipped, and fled away in disgrace down the[124]
long, snowy aisles of the forest, howling as he went, while
the Kitten turned slowly and painfully to the one who
was at the bottom of all this unpleasantness. His ears
were slit; one eye was shut, and the lid of the other
hung very low; he limped badly with his right hind-leg,
and many were the wounds and scratches along his breast
and sides. But he didn’t care. He had won his spurs.

The story of the Kitten is told, for he was a kitten no
longer.

[125]

POINTERS FROM A PORCUPINE QUILL

[127]

He was born in a hollow hemlock log, on a wild April
morning, when the north wind was whipping the lake
with snow, and when winter seemed to have come back
for a season. The Glimmerglass was neither glimmering
nor glassy that morning, but he and his mother were
snug and warm in their wooden nest, and they cared little
for the storm that was raging outside.

It has been said by some that porcupines lay eggs, the
hard, smooth shells of which are furnished by a kind and
thoughtful Providence for the protection of the mothers
from their prickly offspring until the latter have fairly
begun their independent existence. Other people say
that two babies invariably arrive at once, and that one[128]
of them is always dead before it is born. But when my
Porcupine discovered America he had neither a shell on
his back nor a dead twin brother by his side. Neither
was he prickly. He was covered all over with soft, furry,
dark-brown hair. If you had searched carefully along
the middle of his back you might possibly have found
the points of the first quills, just peeping through the
skin; but as yet the thick fur hid them from sight and
touch unless you knew just where and how to look for
them.

He was a very large baby, larger even than a new-born
bear cub, and no doubt his mother felt a justifiable pride
in his size and his general peartness. She was certainly
very careful of him and very anxious for his safety, for
she kept him out of sight, and no one ever saw him
during those first days and weeks of his babyhood. She
did not propose to have any lynxes or wild-cats or other
ill-disposed neighbors fondling him until his quills were
grown. After that they might give him as many love-pats
as they pleased.

He grew rapidly, as all porcupine babies do. Long
hairs, tipped with yellowish-white, came out through the
dense fur, and by and by the quills began to show. His[129]
teeth were lengthening, too, as his mother very well knew,
and between the sharp things in his mouth and those on
his back and sides he was fast becoming a very formidable
nursling. Before he was two months old she was
forced to wean him, but by that time he was quite able
to travel down to the beach and feast on the tender lily-pads
and arrow-head leaves that grew in the shallow
water, within easy reach from fallen and half-submerged
tree-trunks.

One June day, as he and his mother were fishing for
lily-pads, each of them out on the end of a big log, a boy
came down the steep bank that rose almost from the
water’s edge. He wasn’t a very attractive boy. His
clothes were dirty and torn—and so was his face. His
hat was gone, and his hair had not seen a comb for
weeks. The mosquitoes and black-flies and no-see-’ems
had bitten him until his skin was covered with blotches
and his eyelids were so swollen that he could hardly see.
And worst of all, he looked as if he were dying of starvation.
There was almost nothing left of him but skin and
bones, and his clothing hung upon him as it would on a
framework of sticks. If the Porcupine could have philosophized
about it he would probably have said that this[130]
was the wrong time of year for starving; and from his
point of view he would have been right. June, in the
woods, is the season of plenty for everybody but man.
Man thinks he must have wheat-flour, and that doesn’t
grow on pines or maple-trees, nor yet in the tamarack
swamp. But was there any wild, fierce glare in the boy’s
eyes, such a light of hunger as the story-books tell us
is to be seen in the eyes of the wolf and the lynx when
they have not eaten for days and days, and when the
snow lies deep in the forest, and famine comes stalking
through the trees? I don’t think so. He was too weak
and miserable to do any glaring, and his stomach was
aching so hard from eating green gooseberries that he
could scarcely think of anything else.

But his face brightened a very little when he saw the
old she-porcupine, and he picked up a heavy stick and
waded out beside her log. She clacked her teeth together
angrily as he approached; but he paid no attention,
so she drew herself into a ball, with her head down
and her nose covered by her forepaws. Reaching across
her back and down on each side was a belt or girdle of
quills, the largest and heaviest on her whole body, which
could be erected at will, and now they stood as straight[131]
as young spruce-trees. Their tips were dark-brown, but
the rest of their length was nearly white, and when you
looked at her from behind she seemed to have a pointed
white ruffle, edged with black, tied around the middle of
her body. But the boy wasn’t thinking about ruffles,
and he didn’t care what she did with her quills. He
gave her such a thrust with his stick that she had to
grab at the log with both hands to keep from being
shoved into the water. That left her nose unprotected,
and he brought the stick down across it once, twice, three
times. Then he picked her up by one foot, very gingerly,
and carried her off; and our Porky never saw his
mother again.

Perhaps we had best follow her up and see what finally
became of her. Half a mile from the scene of the murder
the boy came upon a woman and a little girl. I
sha’n’t try to describe them, except to say that they were
even worse off than he. Perhaps you read in the papers,
some years ago, about the woman and the two children
who were lost for several weeks in the woods of northern
Michigan.

“I’ve got a porky,” said the boy.

“High up in the top of a tall hemlock.”

He dropped his burden on the ground, and they all[132]
stood around and looked at it. They were hungry—oh,
so hungry!—but for some reason they did not seem very
eager to begin. An old porcupine with her clothes on
is not the most attractive of feasts, and they had no
knife with which to skin her, no salt to season the meat,
no fire to cook it, and no matches with which to start
one. Rubbing two sticks together is a very good way of
starting a fire when you are in a book, but it doesn’t work
very well in the Great Tahquamenon Swamp. And yet,
somehow or other—I don’t know how, and I don’t want
to—they ate that porcupine. And it did them good.
When the searchers found them, a week or two later, the
woman and the boy were dead, but the little girl was
still alive, and for all I know she is living to this day.

Let us return to the Glimmerglass. The young Porcupine
ought to have mourned deeply for his mother, but
I grieve to say that he did nothing of the kind. I doubt
if he was even very lonesome. His brain was smaller,
smoother, and less corrugated than yours is supposed to
be; its wrinkles were few and not very deep; and it may
be that the bump of filial affection was quite polished, or
even that there wasn’t any such bump at all. Anyhow,
he got along very well without her, dispensing with her[133]
much more easily than the woman and the boy and girl
could have. He watched stolidly while the boy killed
her and carried her off, and a little later he was eating
lily-pads again.

As far as his future prospects were concerned, he had
little reason for worrying. He knew pretty well how to
take care of himself, for that is a kind of knowledge which
comes early to young porcupines. Really, there wasn’t
much to learn. His quills would protect him from most
of his enemies, if not from all of them; and, what was
still better, he need never suffer from a scarcity of food.
Of all the animals in the woods the porcupine is probably
the safest from starvation, for he can eat anything
from the soft green leaves of the water-plants to the bark
and the small twigs of the tallest hemlock. Summer and
winter, his storehouse is always full. The young lions
may lack, and suffer hunger, and seek their meat from
God; but the young porky has only to climb a tree and
set his teeth at work. All the woods are his huckleberry.

And, by the way, our Porcupine’s teeth were a great
institution, especially the front ones, and were well
worthy of a somewhat detailed description. They were[134]
long and sharp and yellow, and there were two in the
upper jaw and two in the lower, with a wide gap on each
side between them and the molars. They kept right on
growing as long as he lived, and there is no telling how
far they would have gone if there had been nothing to
stop them. Fortunately, he did a great deal of eating
and chewing, and the constant friction kept them worn
down, and at the same time served to sharpen them.
Like a beaver’s, they were formed of thin shells of hard
enamel in front, backed up by softer pulp behind; and
of course the soft parts wore away first, and left the
enamel projecting in sharp, chisel-like edges that could
gnaw crumbs from a hickory axe-handle.

The next few months were pleasant ones, with plenty
to eat, and nothing to do but keep his jaws going. By
and by the leaves began to fall, and whenever the Porky
walked abroad they rustled around him like silk skirts
going down the aisle of a church. A little later the
beechnuts came down from the sky, and he feasted more
luxuriously than ever. His four yellow chisels tore the
brown shells open, his molars ground the sweet kernels
into meal, and he ate and ate till his short legs could
hardly keep his fat little belly off the ground.[135]

Then came the first light snow, and his feet left tracks
which bore a faint resemblance to a baby’s—that is, if
your imagination was sufficiently vigorous. The snow
grew deeper and deeper, and after a while he had to fairly
plough his way from the hollow log to the tree where
he took his meals. It was hard work, for his clumsy legs
were not made for wading, and at every step he had to
lift and drag himself forward, and then let his body drop
while he shifted his feet. A porcupine’s feet will not go
of themselves, the way other animals’ do. They have to
be picked up one at a time and lifted forward as far as
they can reach—not very far at the best, for they are
fastened to the ends of very short legs. It almost seems
as if he could run faster if he could drop them off and
leave them behind. One evening, when the snow was beginning
to freeze again after a thawing day, he lay down
to rest for a few minutes; and when he started on, some of
his quills were fast in the hardening crust and had to be
left behind. But no matter how difficult the walk might
be, there was always a good square meal at the end of it,
and he pushed valiantly on till he reached his dinner-table.

Sometimes he stayed in the same tree for several days[136]
at a time, quenching his thirst with snow, and sleeping in
a crotch.

He was not by any means the only porcupine in the
woods around the Glimmerglass, although weeks sometimes
passed without his seeing any of his relations. At
other times there were from one to half a dozen porkies
in the trees close by, and when they happened to feel like
it they would call back and forth to each other in queer,
harsh, and often querulous voices.

One afternoon, when he and another porcupine were
occupying trees next each other, two land-lookers came
along and camped for the night between them. Earlier
in the day the men had crossed the trail of a pack of
wolves, and they talked of it as they cut their firewood,
and, with all the skill of the voyageurs of old, cooked
their scanty supper, and made their bed of balsam boughs.
The half-breed was much afraid that they would have
visitors before morning, but the white man only laughed
at the idea.

The meal was hardly finished when they lay down
between their blankets—the white man to sleep, and the
half-breed to listen, listen, listen for the coming of the
wolves. Beyond the camp-fire’s little circle of ruddy[137]
light, vague shadows moved mysteriously, as if living
things were prowling about among the trees and only
waiting for him to fall asleep. Yet there was no wolf-howl
to be heard, nor anything else to break the silence
of the winter night, save possibly the dropping of a dead
branch, or the splitting open of a tree-trunk, torn apart
by the frost. And by and by, in spite of himself, the
half-breed’s eyelids began to droop.

But somebody else was awake—awake, and tempted
with a great temptation. The porcupine—not ours, but
the other one—had caught the fragrance of coffee and
bacon. Here were new odors—different from anything
that had ever before tickled his nostrils—strange, but
indescribably delicious. He waited till the land-lookers
were snoring, and then he started down the tree. Half-way
to the ground he encountered the cloud of smoke
that rose from the camp-fire. Here was another new
odor, but with nothing pleasant about it. It stung his
nostrils and made his eyes smart, and he scrambled up
again as fast as he could go, his claws and quills rattling
on the bark. The half-breed woke with a start. He had
heard something—he was sure he had—the wolves were
coming, and he gave the white man a punch in the ribs.[138]

“Wake up, wake up, m’shoor!” he whispered, excitedly.
“The wolves are coming. I can hear them on
the snow.”

The white man was up in a twinkling, but by that
time the porcupine hod settled himself in a crotch, out
of reach of the smoke, and the woods were silent again.
The two listened with all their ears, but there was not a
sound to be heard.

“You must have been dreaming, Louis.”

The half-breed insisted that he had really heard the
patter of the wolves’ feet on the snow-crust, but the timber
cruiser laughed at him, and lay down to sleep again.
An hour later the performance was repeated, and this
time the white man was angry.

“Don’t you wake me up again, Louis. You’re so
rattled you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Louis was silenced, but not convinced, and he did not
let himself go to sleep again. The fire was dying down,
and little by little the smoke-cloud grew thinner and
thinner until it disappeared entirely. Then the half-breed
heard the same sound once more, but from the
tree overhead, and not from across the snow. He waited
and watched, and presently a dark-brown animal, two[139]
or three feet in length and about the shape of an egg,
came scrambling cautiously down the trunk. The porky
reached the ground in safety, and searched among the
tin plates and the knives and forks until he found a piece
of bacon rind; but he got just one taste of it, and then
Louis hit him over the head with a club. Next morning
the land-lookers had porcupine soup for breakfast, and
they told me afterward that it was very good indeed.

Our Porky had seen it all. He waited till the men
had tramped away through the woods, with their packs
on their backs and their snow-shoes on their feet, and
then he, too, came down from his tree on a tour of investigation.
His friend’s skin lay on the snow not very far
away—if you had pulled the quills and the longer hairs
out of it, it would have made the pelt which the old
fur-traders sometimes sold under the name of “spring
beaver”—but he paid no attention to it. The bacon
rind was what interested him most, and he chewed and
gnawed at it with a relish that an epicure might have
envied. It was the first time in all his gluttonous little
life that he had ever tasted the flavor of salt or wood-smoke;
and neither lily-pads, nor beechnuts, nor berries,
nor anything else in all the woods could compare with it.[140]
Life was worth living, if only for this one experience;
and it may be that he stowed a dim memory of it away
in some dark corner of his brain, and hoped that fortune
would some day be good to him and send him another
rind.

The long, long winter dragged slowly on, the snow
piled up higher and deeper, and the cold grew sharper
and keener. Night after night the pitiless stars seemed
sucking every last bit of warmth out of the old earth and
leaving it dead and frozen forever. Those were the
nights when the rabbits came out of their burrows and
stamped up and down their runways for hours at a time,
trying by exercise to keep from freezing to death, and
when the deer dared not lie down to sleep. And hunger
came with the cold and the deep snow. The buck and
the doe had to live on hemlock twigs till they grew thin
and poor. The partridges were buried in the drifting
snow, and starved to death. The lynxes and the wild-cats
hunted and hunted and hunted, and found no prey;
and it was well for the bears and the woodchucks that
they could sleep all winter and did not need food. Only
the Porcupine had plenty and to spare. Starvation had
no terrors for him.[141]

But the hunger of another may mean danger for us, as
the Porcupine discovered. In ordinary times most of the
animals let him severely alone. They knew better than to
tackle such a living pin-cushion as he; and if any of them
ever did try it, one touch was generally enough. But
when you are ready to perish with hunger, you will take
risks which at other times you would not even think
about; and so it happened that one February afternoon,
as the Porky was trundling himself deliberately over the
snow-crust, a fierce-looking animal with dark fur, bushy
tail, and pointed nose sprang at him from behind a tree
and tried to catch him by the throat, where the quills
did not grow, and there was nothing but soft, warm fur.
The Porcupine knew just what to do in such a case, and
he promptly made himself into a prickly ball, very much
as his mother had done seven or eight months before,
with his face down, and his quills sticking out defiantly.
But this time his scheme of defence did not
work as well as usual, for the sharp little nose dug into
the snow and wriggled its way closer and closer to where
the jugular vein was waiting to be tapped. That fisher
must have understood his business, for he had chosen the
one and only way by which a porcupine may be successfully[142]
attacked. For once in his life our friend was really
scared. Another inch, and the fisher would have won
the game, but he was in such a hurry that he grew careless
and reckless, and did not notice that he had wheeled
half-way round, and that his hind-quarters were alongside
the Porcupine’s. Now, sluggish and slow though a
porky may be, there is one of his members that is as quick
as a steel trap, and that is his tail. Something hit the
fisher a whack on his flank, and he gave a cry of pain
and fury, and jumped back with half a dozen spears sticking
in his flesh. He must have quite lost his head during
the next few seconds, for before he knew it his face
also had come within reach of that terrible tail and its
quick, vicious jerks. That ended the battle, and he fled
away across the snow, almost mad with the agony in his
nose, his eyes, his forehead, and his left flank. As for
the Porky, he made for the nearest tree as fast as he
could go, hardly trusting in his great deliverance. And
I don’t believe there is any sight in all the Great Tahquamenon
Swamp much funnier than a porky in a hurry—a
porky who has really made up his mind that he is
in danger and must hustle for dear life. He is the very
personification of haste and a desire to go somewhere[143]
quick, and he picks his feet up and puts them down
again as fast as ever he can; and yet, no matter how
hard he works, his legs are so short and his body so fat
that he can’t begin to travel as fast as he wants to.

Another day the lynx tried it, and fared even worse than
the fisher—not the Canada lynx, with whom we are already
somewhat acquainted, but the bay lynx. The fisher had
had some sense, and would probably have succeeded if he
had been a little more careful, but the lynx was a fool.
He didn’t know the very first thing about the proper
way to hunt porcupines, and he ought never to have
tried it at all, but he was literally starving, and the
temptation was too much for him. Here was something
alive, something that had warm red blood in its veins
and a good thick layer of flesh over its bones, and that
was too slow to get away from him; and he sailed right
in, tooth and claw, regardless of the consequences. Immediately
he forgot all about the Porcupine, and his own
hunger, and everything else but the terrible pain in his
face and his forepaws. He made the woods fairly ring
with his howls, and he jumped up and down on the
snow-crust, rubbing his head with his paws, and driving
the little barbed spears deeper and deeper into the flesh.[144]
And then, all of a sudden, he ceased his leaping and
bounding and howling, and dropped on the snow in a
limp, lifeless heap, dead as last summer’s lily-pads. One
of the quills had driven straight through his left eye and
into his brain. Was it any wonder if in time the Porcupine
came to think himself invulnerable?

Even a northern Michigan winter has its ending, and
at last there came an evening when all the porcupines
in the woods around the Glimmerglass were calling to
each other from one tree to another. They couldn’t
help it. There was something in the air that stirred
them to a vague restlessness and uneasiness, and our own
particular Porky sat up in the top of a tall hemlock
and sang. Not like Jenny Lind, nor like a thrush or a
nightingale, but his harsh voice went squealing up and
down the scale in a way that was all his own, without
time or rhythm or melody, in the wildest, strangest music
that ever woke the silent woods. I don’t believe that he
himself quite knew what he meant or why he did it.
Certainly no one else could have told, unless some wandering
Indian or trapper may have heard the queer voices
and prophesied that a thaw was coming.

The thaw arrived next day, and it proved to be the[145]
beginning of spring. The summer followed as fast as it
could, and again the lily-pads were green and succulent
in the shallow water along the edge of the Glimmerglass,
and again the Porcupine wandered down to the beach to
feed upon them, discarding for a time his winter diet of
bark and twigs. Why should one live on rye-bread
when one can have cake and ice-cream?

And there among the bulrushes, one bright June
morning, he had a fight with one of his own kind. Just
as he was approaching his favorite log, two other porcupines
appeared, coming from different directions, one a
male, and the other a female. They all scrambled out
upon the log, one after another, but it soon became evident
that three was a crowd. Our Porky and the other
bachelor could not agree at all. They both wanted the
same place and the same lily-pads, and in a little while
they were pushing and shoving and growling and snarling
with all their might, each doing his best to drive the
other off the log and into the water. They did not bite—perhaps
they had agreed that teeth like theirs were too
cruel to be used in civilized warfare—but they struggled
and chattered and swore at each other, and made all sorts
of queer noises while they fought their funny little battle—all[146]
the funnier because each of them had to look out
for the other’s quills. If either had happened to push the
wrong way, they might both have been in serious trouble.
It did not last long. Our Porky was the stronger, and
his rival was driven backward little by little till he lost
his hold completely and slipped into the lake. He came
to the surface at once, and quickly swam to the shore,
where he chattered angrily for a few minutes, and then,
like the sensible bachelor that he was, wandered off up
the beach in search of other worlds more easily conquered.
There was peace on our Porky’s log, and the lily-pads
that grew beside it had never been as fresh and juicy as
they were that morning.

Two months later, on a hot August afternoon, I was
paddling along the edge of the Glimmerglass in company
with a friend of mine, each of us in a small dug-out
canoe, when we found the Porky asleep in the sunshine.
He was lying on the nearly horizontal trunk of a tree
whose roots had been undermined by the waves till it
leaned far out over the lake, hardly a foot from the
water.

My friend, by the way, is the foreman of a lumber-camp.
He has served in the British army, has hunted[147]
whales off the coast of Greenland, married a wife in
Grand Rapids, and run a street-car in Chicago; and now
he is snaking logs out of the Michigan woods. He is
quite a chunk of a man, tall and decidedly well set up,
and it would take a pretty good prize-fighter to whip
him, but he learned that day that a porcupine at close
quarters is worse than a trained pugilist.

“Look at that porky,” he called to me. “I’m going
to ram the canoe into the tree and knock him off into
the water. Just you watch, and you’ll see some fun.”

I was somewhat uncertain whether the joke would
ultimately be on the Porcupine or the man, but it was
pretty sure to be worth seeing, one way or the other, so
I laid my paddle down and awaited developments. Bang!
went the nose of the dug-out against the tree, and the
Porcupine dropped, but not into the water. He landed
in the bow of the canoe, and the horrified look on my
friend’s face was a delight to see. The Porky was wide
awake by this time, for I could hear his teeth clacking as
he advanced to the attack.

“Great Scott! He’s coming straight at me!”

The Porcupine was certainly game. I saw the paddle
rise in the air and come down with a tremendous whack,[148]
but it seemed to have little effect. The Porky’s coat of
quills and hair was so thick that a blow on the back did
not trouble him much. If my friend could have hit him
across the nose it would have ended the matter then and
there, but the canoe was too narrow and its sides too high
for a crosswise stroke. He tried thrusting, but that was
no better. When a good-sized porcupine has really made
up his mind to go somewhere he may be slow, but it takes
more than a punch with the end of a stick to stop him;
and this Porky had fully determined to go aft and get
acquainted with the foreman.

“He quickly made his way to the beach.”

My friend couldn’t even kick, for he was kneeling
on the bottom of the dug-out, with his feet behind
him, and if he tried to stand up he would probably
capsize.

“Say, Hulbert, what am I going to do?”

I didn’t give him any advice, for my sympathies were
largely with the Porcupine. Besides, I hadn’t any advice
to give. Just then the canoe drifted around so that
I could look into it, and I beheld the Porcupine bearing
down on my helpless friend like Birnam Wood on its way
to Dunsinane, his ruffle of quills erect, fire in his little
black eyes, and a thirst for vengeance in his whole aspect.[149]
My friend made one or two final and ineffectual jabs at
him, and then gave it up.

“It’s no use!” he called; “I’ll have to tip over!”
and the next second the canoe was upside down and both
belligerents were in the water. The Porcupine floated
high—I suppose his hollow quills helped to keep him up—and
he proved a much better swimmer than I had expected,
for he quickly made his way to the beach and
disappeared in the woods, still chattering disrespectfully.
My friend waded ashore, righted his canoe, and we resumed
our journey. I don’t think I’ll tell you what he said.
He got over it after a while, and in the end he probably
enjoyed his joke more than if it had turned out as he
had intended.

The summer followed the winter into the past, and the
Moon of Falling Leaves came round again. The Porcupine
was not alone. Another porky was with him, and
the two seemed very good friends. In fact, his companion
was the very same lady porcupine who had stood
by while he fought the battle of the log and the lily-pads,
though I do not suppose that they had been keeping
company all those months, and I am by no means certain
that they remembered that eventful morning at all. Let[150]
us hope they did, for the sake of the story. Who knows
how much or how little of love was stirring the slow
currents of their sluggish natures—of such love as binds
the dove or the eagle to his mate, or of such steadfast
affection as the Beaver and his wife seem to have felt for
each other? Not much, perhaps; yet they climbed the
same tree, ate from the same branch, and drank at the
same spring; and the next April there was another
arrival in the old hollow log—twins, this time, and both
of them alive.

But the Porcupine never saw his children, for a
wandering fit seized him, and he left the Glimmerglass
before they were born. Two or three miles away was a
little clearing where a mossback lived. A railway crossed
one edge of it, between the hill and the swamp, and five
miles away was a junction, where locomotives were constantly
moving about, backing, hauling, and making up
their trains. As the mossback lay awake in the long,
quiet, windless winter nights, he often heard them puffing
and snorting, now with slow, heavy coughs, and now
quick and sharp and rapid. One night when he was half
asleep he heard something that said, “chew-chew-chew-chew-chew-chew,”
like an engine that has its train moving[151]
and is just beginning to get up speed. At first he
paid no attention to it. But the noise suddenly stopped
short, and after a pause of a few seconds it began again
at exactly the same speed; stopped again, and began a
third time. And so it went on, chewing and pausing,
chewing and pausing, with always just so many chews to
the second, and just so many seconds to each rest. No
locomotive ever puffed like that. The mossback was
wide awake now, and he muttered something about “another
of those pesky porkies.” He had killed the last
one that came around the house, and had wanted his
wife to cook it for dinner and see how it tasted, but she
wouldn’t. She said that the very sight of it was enough
for her, and more than enough; and that it was all she
could do to eat pork and potatoes after looking at it.

He turned over and tried to go to sleep again, but
without success. That steady “chew-chew-chew” was
enough to keep a woodchuck awake, and at last he got
up and went to the door. The moonlight on the snow
was almost as bright as day, and there was the Porcupine,
leaning against the side of the barn, and busily rasping
the wood from around the head of a rusty nail. The
mossback threw a stick of stove-wood at him, and he[152]
lumbered clumsily away across the snow. But twenty
minutes later he was back again, and this time he marched
straight into the open shed at the back of the house, and
began operations on a wash-tub, whose mingled flavor of
soap and humanity struck him as being very delicious.
Again the mossback appeared in the doorway, shivering a
little in his night-shirt.

The Porcupine was at the foot of the steps. He had
stopped chewing when the door opened, and now he lifted
his forepaws and sat half-erect, his yellow teeth showing
between his parted lips, and his little eyes staring at the
lamp which the mossback carried. The quills slanted
back from all around his diminutive face, and even from
between his eyes—short at first, but growing longer toward
his shoulders and back. Long whitish bristles were
mingled with them, and the mossback could not help
thinking of a little old, old man, with hair that was
grizzly-gray, and a face that was half-stupid and half-sad
and wistful. He was not yet two years of age, but I
believe that a porcupine is born old. Some of the Indians
say that he is ashamed of his homely looks, and that
that is the reason why, by day, he walks so slowly, with
hanging head and downcast eyes; but at night, they say,[153]
when the friendly darkness hides his ugliness, he lifts his
head and runs like a dog. In spite of the hour and the
cheering influence of the wash-tub, our Porky seemed even
more low-spirited than usual. Perhaps the lamplight
had suddenly reminded him of his personal appearance.
At any rate he looked so lonesome and forlorn that the
mossback felt a little thrill of pity for him, and decided
not to kill him after all, but to drive him away again.
He started down the steps with his lamp in one hand and
a stick of wood in the other, and then—he never knew
how it happened, but in some way he stumbled and fell.
Never in all his life, not even when his wildest nightmare
came and sat on him in the wee, sma’ hours, had he come
so near screaming out in terror as he did at that moment.
He thought he was going to sit down on the Porcupine.
Fortunately for both of them, but especially for the man,
he missed him by barely half an inch, and the Porky
scuttled away as fast as his legs could carry him.

In spite of this unfriendly reception, the Porcupine
hung around the edges of the clearing for several months,
and enjoyed many a meal such as seldom falls to the lot
of the woods-people. One night he found an empty
pork-barrel out behind the barn, its staves fairly saturated[154]
with salt, and hour after hour he scraped away upon it,
perfectly content. Another time, to his great satisfaction,
he discovered a large piece of bacon rind among
some scraps that the mossback’s wife had thrown away.
Later he invaded the sugar-bush by night, gnawing deep
notches in the edges of the sap buckets and barrels, and
helping himself to the sirup in the big boiling-pan.

Life was not all feasting, however. There was a dog
who attacked him two or three times, but who finally
learned to keep away and mind his own business. Once,
when he had ventured a little too close to the house, and
was making an unusual racket with his teeth, the mossback
came to the door and fired a shotgun at him, cutting
off several of his quills. And still another night, late in the
spring, when he was prowling around the barn, a bull calf
came and smelled him. Next morning the mossback and
his boys threw that calf down on the ground and tied his
feet to a stump, and three of them sat on him while a
fourth pulled the quills from his nose with a pair of
pincers. You should have heard him grunt.

Then came the greatest adventure of all. Down beside
the railway was a small platform on which supplies for
the lumber-camps were sometimes unloaded from the[155]
trains. Brine and molasses and various other delectable
things had leaked out of the barrels and kegs and boxes,
and the Porcupine discovered that the planks were very
nicely seasoned and flavored. He visited them once too
often, for one summer evening, as he was gnawing away
at the site of an ancient puddle of molasses, the accommodation
train rolled in and came to a halt. He tried to
hide behind a stump, but the trainmen caught sight of him,
and before he knew it they had shoved him into an empty
box and hoisted him into the baggage-car. They turned
him loose among the passengers on the station platform
at Sault Ste. Marie, and his arrival created a sensation.

When the first excitement had subsided, all the girls
in the crowd declared that they must have some quills for
souvenirs, and all the young men set to work to procure
them, hoping to distinguish themselves by proving their
superiority in strength and courage over this poor little
twenty-pound beast just out of the woods. Most of them
succeeded in getting some quills, and also in acquiring
some painful experience—especially the one who attempted
to lift the Porcupine by the tail, and who learned that
that interesting member is the very hottest and liveliest
portion of the animal’s anatomy. They finally discovered[156]
that the best way to get quills from a live porcupine is
to hit him with a piece of board. The sharp points penetrate
the wood and stick there, the other ends come loose
from his skin, and there you have them. Our friend lost
most of his armor that day, and it was a good thing for
him that departed quills, like clipped hair, will renew
themselves in the course of time.

One of the brakemen carried him home, and he spent
the next few months in the enjoyment of city life.
Whether he found much pleasure in it is, perhaps, a
question, but I am rather inclined to think that he did.
He had plenty to eat, and he learned that apples are very
good indeed, and that the best way to partake of them is
to sit up on your haunches and hold them between your
forepaws. He also learned that men are not always to
be regarded as enemies, for his owner and his owner’s children
were good to him and soon won his confidence. But,
after all, the city was not home, and the woods were; so
he employed some of his spare time in gnawing a hole
through the wall in a dark corner of the shed where he
was confined, and one night he scrambled out and hid
himself in an empty barn. A day or two later he was in
the forest again.[157]

The remaining years of his life were spent on the
banks of St. Mary’s River, and for the most part they
were years of quietness and contentment. He was far
from his early home, but the bark of a birch or a maple
or a hemlock is much the same on St. Mary’s as by the
Glimmerglass. He grew bigger and fatter as time went
on, and some weeks before he died he must have weighed
thirty or forty pounds.

Once in a while there was a little dash of excitement
to keep life from becoming too monotonous—if too much
monotony is possible in a porcupine’s existence. One
night he scrambled up the steps of a little summer cottage
close to the edge of the river, and, finding the door
unlatched, he pushed it open and walked in. It proved
to be a cottage full of girls, and they stood around on
chairs and the tops of wash-stands, bombarded him with
curling-irons, poked feebly with bed-slats, and shrieked
with laughter till the farmers over on the Canadian shore
turned in their beds and wondered what could be happening
on Uncle Sam’s side of the river. The worst of
it was that in his travels around the room he had come
up behind the door and pushed it shut, and it was some
time before even the red-haired girl could muster up sufficient[158]
courage to climb down from her perch and open it
again.

At another time an Indian robbed him of the longest
and best of his quills—nearly five inches in length some
of them—and carried them off to be used in ornamenting
birch-bark baskets. And on still another occasion he
narrowly escaped death at the hands of an irate canoe-man,
in the side of whose Rob Roy he had gnawed a
great hole.

The end came at last, and it was the saddest, hardest,
strangest fate that can ever come to a wild creature of
the woods. He—who had never known hunger in all his
life, who was almost the only animal in the forest who
had never looked famine in the eye, whose table was
spread with good things from January to December, and
whose storehouse was full from Lake Huron to the Pictured
Rocks—he of all others, was condemned to die of
starvation in the midst of plenty. The Ancient Mariner,
with water all around him and not a drop to drink, was
no worse off than our Porcupine; and the Mariner finally
escaped, but the Porky didn’t.

One of the summer tourists who wandered up into the
north woods that year had carried with him a little rifle,[159]
more of a toy than a weapon, a thing that a sportsman
would hardly have condescended to laugh at. And one
afternoon, by ill luck, he caught sight of the Porcupine
high up in the top of a tall tree. It was his first chance
at a genuine wild beast, and he fired away all his cartridges
as fast as he could load them into his gun. He
thought that every shot missed, and he was very much
ashamed of his marksmanship. But he was mistaken.
The very last bullet broke one of the Porcupine’s lower
front teeth, and hurt him terribly. It jarred him to the
very end of his tail, and his head felt as if it was being
smashed to bits. For a minute or two the strength all
went out of him, and if he had not been lying in a safe,
comfortable crotch he would have fallen to the ground.

The pain and the shock passed away after a while, but
when supper-time came—and it was almost always supper-time
with the Porcupine—his left lower incisor was
missing. The right one was uninjured, however, and for
a while he got on pretty well, merely having to spend a
little more time than usual over his meals. But that was
only the beginning of trouble. The stump of the broken
tooth was still there and still growing, and it was soon as
long as ever, but in the meantime its fellow in the upper[160]
jaw had grown out beyond its normal length, and the
two did not meet properly. Instead of coming together
edge to edge, as they should have done, each wearing the
other down and keeping it from reaching out too far,
each one now pushed the other aside, and still they kept
on growing, growing, growing. Worst of all, in a short
time they had begun to crowd his jaws apart so that he
could hardly use his right-hand teeth, and they too were
soon out of shape. The evil days had come, and the
sound of the grinding was low. Little by little his
mouth was forced open wider and wider, and the food
that passed his lips grew less and less. His teeth, that
had all his life been his best tools and his most faithful
servants, had turned against him in his old age, and were
killing him by inches. Let us not linger over those days.

He was spared the very last and worst pangs—for that,
at least, we may be thankful. On the last day of his life
he sat under a beech-tree, weak and weary and faint.
He could not remember when he had eaten. His coat of
hair and quills was as thick and bushy as ever, and outwardly
he had hardly changed at all, but under his skin
there was little left but bones. And as he sat there and
wished that he was dead—if such a wish can ever come[161]
to a wild animal—the Angel of Mercy came, in the shape
of a man with a revolver in his pistol pocket—a man
who liked to kill things.

“A porky!” he said. “Guess I’ll shoot him, just for
fun.”

The Porcupine saw him coming and knew the danger;
and for a moment the old love of life came back as strong
as ever, and he gathered his feeble strength for one last
effort, and started up the tree. He was perhaps six feet
from the ground when the first report came.

“Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!” Four shots, as fast
as the self-cocking revolver could pour the lead into his
body. The Porky stopped climbing. For an instant he
hung motionless on the side of the tree, and then his
forepaws let go, and he swayed backward and fell to the
ground. And that was the end of the Porcupine.

[163]

THE ADVENTURES OF A LOON

[165]

One snowy autumn night, three years ago, he was swimming
on the Glimmerglass in company with his first wife—one
of the first, that is. There may possibly have
been others before her, but if so I wasn’t acquainted
with them. It was a fine evening—especially for loons.
There was no wind, and the big, soft flakes came floating
lazily down to lose themselves in the quiet lake. The
sky, the woods, and the shores were all blotted out;
and the loons reigned alone, king and queen of a dim
little world of leaden water and falling snow. And right
royally they swam their kingdom, with an air as if they
thought God had made the Glimmerglass for their especial
benefit. Perhaps He had.

“He went under as simply as you would step out of bed.”

It was very, very lonely, but they liked it all the better
for that. At times they even lost sight of each other
for a little while, as one dived in search of a herring or[166]
a young salmon trout. I wish we could have followed
Mahng down under the water and watched him at his
hunting. He didn’t dive as you do, with a jump and a
plunge and a splash. He merely drew his head back a
little and then thrust it forward and downward, and
went under as simply and easily as you would step out of
bed, and with a good deal more dignity. It was his feet
that did it, of course. They were not good for much for
walking, but they were the real thing when it came to
swimming or diving. They were large and broad and
strongly webbed, and the short stout legs which carried
them were flattened and compressed that they might slip
edgewise through the water, like a feathered oar-blade.
The muscles which worked them were very powerful, and
they kicked backward with so much vigor that two little
jets of spray were often tossed up in his wake as he went
under, like the splash from a steamer’s paddles. And he
had a rudder, too, for in the after part of his body there
were two muscles just like tiller-ropes, fastened to his tail
in such a way that they could twist it to either side, and
steer him to port or starboard as occasion demanded.
With his long neck stretched far out in front, his wings
pressed tightly against his sides, and his legs and feet[167]
working as if they went by steam, he shot through the
water like a submarine torpedo-boat. “The Herdsman
of the Deep,” the Scottish Highlanders used to say, when
in winter a loon came to visit their lochs and fiords.
Swift and strong and terrible, he ranged the depths of
the Glimmerglass, seeking what he might devour; and
perhaps you can imagine how hastily the poor little fishes
took their departure whenever they saw him coming their
way. Sometimes they were not quite quick enough, and
then his long bill closed upon them, and he swallowed
them whole without even waiting to rise to the surface.

The chase thus brought to a successful conclusion, or
perhaps the supply of air in his lungs giving out, he returned
to the upper world, and again his voice rang out
through the darkness and the falling snow. Then his
wife would answer him from somewhere away off across
the lake, and they would call back and forth to each
other with many a laugh and shout, or, drawing closer
and closer together, they would cruise the Glimmerglass
side by side, with the big flakes dropping gently on their
backs and folded wings, and the ripples spreading out on
either hand like the swell from the bow of a ship.[168]

Once Mahng stayed down a little longer than usual,
and when he came up he heard his wife calling him in an
excited tone, as if something had happened to her. He
hurried toward her, and presently he saw a light shining
dimly through the throng of moving snow-flakes,
and growing brighter and brighter as he approached
until it was fairly dazzling. As he drew nearer still he
caught sight of his wife sitting on the water squarely in
front of that light, and watching it with all her eyes.
She was not calling now. She had forgotten Mahng,
she had forgotten to paddle, she had forgotten everything,
in her wonder at this strange, beautiful thing, the like of
which had never before been seen upon the Glimmerglass.
She herself was a rarely beautiful sight—if she had only
known it—with the dark water rippling gently against
her bosom, her big black head thrust forward, and the
feathers of her throat and breast glistening in the glare
of the headlight, white as the snow that was falling
around her.

All this Mahng saw. What he did not see, because
his eyes were dazzled, was a boat in the shadow behind
the light, and a rifle-barrel pointing straight at his wife’s
breast. There was a blinding flash, a sharp, crashing report,[169]
and a cloud of smoke; and Mahng dived as quick
as a wink. But his wife would never dive again. The
bullet had gone tearing through her body, and she lay
stretched out on the water, perfectly motionless, and apparently
dead. And then, just as Mahng came to the
surface a hundred yards away, and just as my partner
put out his hand to pick her up, she lifted her head and
gave a last wild cry. Mahng heard it and answered, but
he was too far away to see what happened. He dared
not return till the light had disappeared, and by that
time she was gone. She had straggled violently for a
moment, and had struck savagely at the hunter’s hand,
and then she had as suddenly collapsed, the water turned
red, and her eyes closed forever. Did you know that
among all God’s creatures the birds are the only ones
whose eyes close naturally in death? Even among men
it is not so, for when our friends die we lay our hands
reverently upon their faces, and weight their stiff lids
with gold. But for the bird, Nature herself performs the
last kindly office, and as the light fades out from the
empty windows of the soul, the curtain falls of its own
accord.

“She herself was a rarely beautiful sight.”

During the next two or three days Mahng’s voice was[170]
frequently to be heard, apparently calling his wife.
Sometimes it was a mournful, long-drawn cry—”Hoo-WOOOO-ooo”—that
might have been heard a mile away—a
cry that seemed the very essence of loneliness, and
that went right down where you lived and made you feel
like a murderer. And sometimes he broke into a wild
peal of laughter, as if he hoped that that might better
serve to call her back to him.

His children had gone south some time before. They
had seemed anxious to see the world. Perhaps, too, they
had dreaded the approach of colder weather more than the
older birds, who had become somewhat seasoned by previous
autumns. Anyhow, they had taken the long trail
toward the Gulf of Mexico, and now that his wife was
gone Mahng was entirely alone. At last he seemed to
make up his mind that he might as well follow them, and
one afternoon, as he was swimming aimlessly about, I saw
him suddenly dash forward, working his wings with all
their might, beating the water at every stroke, and
throwing spray like a side-wheeler. Slowly—for his
body was heavy, and his wings were rather small for his
size—slowly he lifted himself from the water, all the time
rushing forward faster and faster. He couldn’t have[171]
made it if he hadn’t had plenty of sea-room, but by
swinging round and round in long, wide circles he managed
to rise little by little till at last he was clear of the
tree-tops. He passed right over my head as he stood
away to the south—his long neck stretched far out in
front, his feet pointing straight back beyond the end of
his short tail, and his wings beating the air with tremendous
energy. How they did whizz! He made almost
as much noise as a train of cars. He laughed as he went
by, and you would have said that he was in high spirits;
but before he disappeared that lonely, long-drawn cry
came back once more—”Hoo-WOOOO-ooo.”

In the course of his winter wanderings through the
South he happened to alight one day on a certain wild
pond down in Mississippi, and there he found another
loon—a widow whose former husband had lost his life
the previous summer under rather peculiar circumstances.

Beside a small lake in Minnesota there lives an old
Dutchman who catches fish with empty bottles. On any
calm, still day you may see a lot of them floating upright
in the water, all tightly corked, and each with the end of
a fishing-line tied around its neck. They seem very
decorous and well-behaved, but let a fish take one of[172]
the hooks and begin to pull, and immediately that particular
bottle turns wrong end up, and acts as if it had
taken a drop too much of its own original contents.
Then the Dutchman paddles out in his little scow, and
perhaps by the time he has hauled in his fish and re-baited
the hook another bottle is excitedly standing on
its head. But never before nor since have any of them
behaved as wildly as the one that a loon got hold of.

The loon—not Mahng, you understand, but the first
husband of his new acquaintance—had dived in search of
his dinner, and the first thing he saw that looked as if it
might be good to eat was the bait on one of the Dutchman’s
hooks. He swallowed it, of course, and for the
next five minutes he went charging up and down that
pond at a great rate, followed by a green glass monster
with the name of a millionnaire brewer blown in its side.
Sometimes he was on the surface, and sometimes he was
under it; but wherever he went that horrible thing was
close behind him, pulling so hard that the sharp cord cut
the corners of his mouth till it bled. Once or twice he
tried to fly, but the line caught his wing and brought
him down again. When he dived, it tangled itself around
his legs and clogged the machinery; and when he tried to[173]
shout, the hook in his throat would not let him do anything
more than cough. The Dutchman got him at last,
and eventually Mahng got his widow, as you shall see.

She had her children to take care of, and for a time
she was very busy, but after a few weeks they flew away
to the south, as Mahng’s had done, and she was free to
go where she liked and do what she pleased. For a while
she stayed where she was, like a sensible person. Minnesota
suited her very well, and she was in no hurry to
leave. But, of course, she could not stay on indefinitely,
for some frosty night the lake would freeze over, and then
she could neither dive for fish nor rise upon the wing. A
loon on ice is about as helpless as an oyster. And so at
last she, too, went south. She travelled by easy stages,
and had a pleasant journey, with many a stop, and many
a feast in the lakes and rivers along the route. I should
like to know, just out of curiosity, how many fish found
their way down her capacious gullet during that pilgrimage
through Illinois and Kentucky and Tennessee.

Well, no matter about that. The Mississippi pond
was in sight, and she was just slanting down toward the
water, when a hunter fired at her from behind a clump of
trees. His aim was all too true, and she fell headlong to[174]
the ground, with a broken wing dangling helplessly at
her side.

Now, as you probably know, a loon isn’t built for running.
There is an old story, one which certainly has the
appearance of truth, to the effect that when Nature manufactured
the first of these birds she forgot to give him
any legs at all, and that he had started off on the wing
before she noticed her mistake. Then she picked up the
first pair that came to hand and threw them after him.
Unfortunately they were a misfit, and, what was, perhaps,
still worse, they struck his body in the wrong place.
They were so very short and so very far aft that, although
he could stand nearly as straight as a man, it was almost
impossible for him to move about on them. When he
had to travel on land, which he always avoided as far as
he could, he generally shoved himself along on his breast,
and often used his wings and his bill to help himself forward.
All his descendants are just like him, so you can
see that the widow’s chances were pretty small, with the
hunter bursting out of the bushes, and a broad strip of
beach between her and the friendly pond.

But she was a person of resource and energy, and in
this great emergency she literally rose to the occasion,[175]
and did something that she had never done before in all
her life, and probably will never do again. The astonished
hunter saw her lift herself until she stood nearly
upright, and then actually run across the beach toward
the water. She was leaning forward a trifle, her long
neck was stretched out, her two short legs were trotting
as fast as they could go, and her one good wing was wildly
waving in a frantic endeavor to get on. It was a sight
that very few people have ever seen, and it would have
been comical if it hadn’t been a matter of life and death.
The hunter was hard after her, and his legs were a yard
long, while hers were only a few inches, so it was not surprising
that he caught her just as she reached the margin.
She wriggled out of his grasp and dashed on through the
shallow water, and he followed close behind. In a moment
he stooped and made another grab at her, and this
time he got his arms around her body and pinned her
wings down against her sides. But he had waded out a
little too far, and had reached the place where the bottom
suddenly shelves off from fifteen inches to seventy-two.
His foot slipped, and in another moment he
was splashing wildly about in the water, and the loon
was free.[176]

A broken wing is not necessarily as serious a matter as
you might suppose. The cold water kept the inflammation
down, and it seemed as if all the vital forces of her
strong, healthy body set to work at once to repair the
damage. If any comparative anatomist ever gets hold of
the widow and dissects her, he will find a curious swelling
in the principal bone of her left wing, like a plumber’s
join in a lead pipe, and he will know what it means. It
is the place where Nature soldered the broken pieces together.
And it was while Nature was engaged in this
soldering operation that Mahng arrived and began to
cultivate the widow’s acquaintance.

But speaking of Mahng’s wedding-garment reminds me
that I haven’t told you about his winter dress. His back
and wings were very dark-brown, and his breast and under-parts
were white. His head and the upper portion of his
neck were black; his bill was black, or blackish, and so[177]
were his feet. His coat was very thick and warm, and
his legs were feathered right down to the heel-joint.
More than five feet his wings stretched from tip to tip,
and he weighed at least twelve pounds, and would be
still larger before he died.

As to his nuptial finery, its groundwork was much
the same, but its trimmings were different and were very
elegant. White spots appeared all over his back and the
upper surfaces of his wings, some of them round, and
some square. They were not thrown on carelessly, but
were arranged in gracefully curving lines, and they quite
changed his appearance, especially if one were as near
him as one is supposed to be during a courting. His
spring neckwear, too, was in exceedingly good taste, for
he put on a sort of collar of very narrow vertical stripes,
contrasting beautifully with the black around and between
them. Higher up on his neck and head the deep
black feathers gleamed and shone in the sunlight with
brilliant irridescent tints of green and violet. He was a
very handsome bird.

And now everything was going north. The sun was
going north, the wind was going north, the birds were
going, and summer herself was sweeping up from the[178]
tropics as fast as ever she could travel. Mahng was getting
very restless. A dozen times a day he would spread
his wings and beat the air furiously, dashing the spray in
every direction, and almost lifting his heavy body out of
the water. But the time was not yet come, and presently
he would fold his pinions and go back to his courting.

Do you think he was very inconstant? Do you blame
him for not being more faithful to the memory of the
bird who was shot at his side only a few months before?
Don’t be too hard on him. What can a loon do when
the springtime calls and the wind blows fresh and strong,
when the new strong wine of life is coursing madly
through his veins, and when his dreams are all of the
vernal flight to the lonely northland, where the water is
cold and the fish are good, and where there are such delightful
nesting-places around the marshy ponds?

But how did his new friend feel about it? Would she
go with him? Ah! Wouldn’t she? Had not she, too,
put on a wedding-garment just like his? And what was
she there for, anyhow, if not to be wooed, and to find a
mate, and to fly away with him a thousand miles to the
north, and there, beside some lonely little lake, brood
over her eggs and her young? Her wing was gaining[179]
strength all the time, and at last she was ready. You
should have heard them laugh when the great day came
and they pulled out for Michigan—Mahng a little in the
lead, as became the larger and stronger, and his new wife
close behind. There had been nearly a week of cooler
weather just before the start, which had delayed them
a little, but now the south wind was blowing again, and
over and over it seemed to say,

“The old earth sliding southward fifty miles an hour.”

Over the fresh fields, green with the young wheat;
over the winding rivers and the smiling lakes; over the—shut
your eyes, and dream a little while, and see if you
can imagine what it was like. Does it make you wish
you were a loon yourself? Never mind; some day, perhaps,
we too shall take our wedding-journeys in the air;
not on feathered pinions, but with throbbing engines and
whizzing wheels, and with all the power of steam or
electricity to lift us and bear us onward. We shall skim
the prairies and leap the mountains, and roam over the
ocean like the wandering albatross. To-day we shall
breathe the warm, spicy breath of the tropic islands, and
to-morrow we shall sight the white gleam of the polar
ice-pack. When the storm gathers we shall mount above
it, and looking down we shall see the lightning leap from
cloud to cloud, and the rattling thunder will come upward,
not downward, to our ears. When the world below
is steeped in the shadows of coming night, we shall still[181]
watch the sunset trailing its glories over the western
woods and mountains; and when morning breaks we
shall be the first to welcome the sunrise as it comes rushing
up from the east a thousand miles an hour. The
wind of the upper heavens will be pure and keen and
strong, and not even a sleigh-ride on a winter’s night can
set the live blood dancing as it will dance and tingle up
there above the clouds. And riding on the air, alone
with the roaring engines that have become for the time
a part of ourselves, we shall know at last what our earth
is really like, for we shall see it as the loons see it—yes,
as God and His angels see it—this old earth, on which
we have lived for so many thousand years, and yet have
never seen.

But, after all, the upper heavens will not be home;
and some day, as we shoot northward, or southward, or
eastward, or westward, we shall see beneath us the spot
that is to be for us the best and dearest place in all the
world, and dropping down out of the blue we shall find
something that is even better than riding on the wings of
the wind. That was what happened to Mahng and his
wife, for one spring evening, as they came rushing over
the pine-tops and the maples and birches, they saw the[182]
Glimmerglass just ahead. The water lay like polished
steel in the fading light, and the brown ranks of the still
leafless trees stood dark and silent around the shores. It
was very quiet, and very, very lonely; and the lake and
the woods seemed waiting and watching for something.
And into that stillness and silence the loons came with
shouting and laughter, sweeping down on a long slant,
and hitting the water with a splash. The echoes awoke
and the Glimmerglass was alive, and summer had come
to the northland.

They chose a place where the shore was low and
marshy, and there, only two or three yards from the
water’s edge, they built a rude nest of grass and weeds
and lily-pads. Two large greenish eggs, blotched with
dark-brown, lay in its hollow; and the wife sat upon
them week after week, and covered them with the warm
feathers of her broad, white breast. Once in a while she
left them long enough to stretch her wings in a short
flight, or to dive in search of a fish, but she was never
gone very long. It was a weary vigil that she kept, but
she sat there in daylight and darkness, through sunshine
and storm, till at last the day came when there were four
loons instead of two at the Glimmerglass.[183]

The chicks were very smart and active, and they took
to the water almost as soon as they were out of the shell,
swimming and diving as if they had been accustomed to
it for weeks instead of hours. In some ways, however,
they required a good deal of care. For one thing, their
little stomachs were not quite equal to the task of assimilating
raw fish, and the parents had to swallow all their
food for them, keep it down till it was partly digested,
and then pass it up again to the hungry children. It
made a good deal of delay, and it must have been very
unpleasant, but it seemed to be the only practicable way
of dealing with the situation. I am glad to say that it
did not last very long, for by the time they were two
weeks old the young loons were able to take their fish
and reptiles and insects at first hand.

When they first arrived the chicks were covered all
over with stiff down, of a dark, sooty gray on their
backs, and white underneath. But this did not last long,
either. The first feathers soon appeared, and multiplied
rapidly. I can’t say that the young birds were particularly
handsome, for even when their plumage was complete
it was much quieter and duller of hue than their parents’.
But they were fat and plump, and I think they thoroughly[184]
enjoyed life, especially before they discovered that
there were enemies as well as friends in the world. That
was a kind of knowledge that could not be avoided very
long, however. They soon learned that men, and certain
other animals such as hawks and skunks, were to be carefully
shunned; and you should have seen them run on
the water whenever a suspicious-looking character hove in
sight. Their wings were not yet large enough for flying,
but they flapped them with all their might, and scampered
across the Glimmerglass so fast that their little legs fairly
twinkled, and they actually left a furrow in the water
behind them. But the bottom of the lake was really the
safest refuge, and if a boat or a canoe pressed them too
closely they would usually dive below the surface, while
the older birds tried to lure the enemy off in some other
direction by calling and shouting and making all sorts of
demonstrations.

Generally these tactics were successful, but not always.
Once some boys cornered the whole family in a small,
shallow bay, where the water was not deep enough for
diving; and before they could escape one of the youngsters
was driven up onto the beach. He tried to hide
behind a log, but he was captured and earned off, and I[185]
wish I had time to tell you of all the things that happened
to him before he was finally killed and eaten by a
dog. It was pretty tough on the old birds, as well as on
him, but they still had one chick left, and you can’t expect
to raise all your children as long as bigger people
are so fond of kidnapping and killing them.

Not all the people who came to see them were bent on
mischief, however. There was a party of girls and boys,
for instance, who camped beside the Glimmerglass for a
few weeks, and who liked to follow them around the lake
in a row-boat and imitate their voices, just for the fun of
making them talk back. One girl in particular became
so accomplished in the loon language that Mahng would
often get very much excited as he conversed with her, and
would sometimes let the boat creep nearer and nearer
until they were only a few rods apart. And then, all of
a sudden, he would duck his head and go under, perhaps
in the very middle of a laugh. The siren was getting
a little too close. Her intentions might possibly be all
right, but it was just as well to be on the safe side.

The summer was nearly gone, and now Mahng did
something which I fear you will strongly disapprove. I
didn’t want to tell you about it, but I suppose I must.[186]
Two or three male loons passed over the Glimmerglass
one afternoon, calling and shouting as they went, and he
flew up and joined them, and came back no more that
summer. It looked like a clear case of desertion, but we
must remember that he had stood by his wife all through
the trying period of the spring and early summer, and
that the time was at hand when the one chick that was
left would go out into the world to paddle his own canoe,
and when she would no longer need his help in caring for
a family of young children. But you think he might
have stayed with her, anyhow? Well, so do I; I’m sorry
he didn’t. They say that his cousins, the Red-throated
Loons, marry for life, and live together from the wedding-day
till death, and I don’t see why he couldn’t have done
as well as they. But it doesn’t seem to be the custom
among the Great Northern Divers. Mahng was only
following the usual practice of his kind, and if his first
wife had not been shot it is likely that they would have
separated before they had gone very far south. And yet
it does not follow that the marriage was not a love-match.
If you had seen them at their housekeeping I
think you would have pronounced him a very good husband
and father. Perhaps the conjugal happiness of the[187]
spring and early summer was all the better for a taste of
solitude during the rest of the year.

As I said, the time was near when the chick would
strike out for himself. He soon left his mother, and a
little later she too started for the Gulf of Mexico.
Summer was over, and the Glimmerglass was lonelier
than ever.

Mahng came back next spring, and of course he
brought a wife with him. But was she the same wife
who had helped him make the Glimmerglass ring with his
shouting twelve months before? Well, I—I don’t quite
know. She looked very much like her, and I certainly
hope she was the same bird. I should like to believe
that they had been reunited somewhere down in Texas
or Mississippi or Louisiana, and that they had come back
together for another season of parental cares and joys.
But when I consider the difficulties in the way I cannot
help feeling doubtful about it. The two birds had gone
south at different times and perhaps by different routes.
Before they reached the lower Mississippi Valley they
may have been hundreds of miles apart. Was it to be
reasonably expected that Mahng, when he was ready to
return, would search every pond and stream from the[188]
Cumberland to the Gulf? And is it likely that, even
if he had tried for weeks and weeks, he could ever have
found his wife of the previous summer? His flight was
swift and his sight keen, and his clarion voice rang far
and wide over the marshes; but it is no joke to find
one particular bird in a region covering half a dozen
States. If they had arranged to come north separately,
and meet at the Glimmerglass, there would not have been
so many difficulties in the way, but they didn’t do that.
Anyhow, Mahng brought a wife home. That much, at
least, is established. They set to work at once to build
a nest and make ready for some new babies; but, alas!
there was little parental happiness or responsibility in
store for them that year.

If you had been there you might have seen them swimming
out from shore one bright, beautiful spring morning,
when the sun had just risen, and the woods and waters
lay calm and peaceful in the golden light, fairer than
words can tell. They were after their breakfast, and
presently they dived to see what was to be had. The
light is dim down there in the depths of the Glimmerglass,
the weeds are long and slimy, and the mud of the
bottom is black and loathsome. But what does that[189]
matter? One can go back whenever one pleases. A few
quick, powerful strokes will take you up into the open
air, and you can see the woods and the sky. Aha!
There is a herring, his scales shining like silver in the
faint green light that comes down through the water.
And there is a small salmon trout, with his gray-brown
back and his golden sides. A fish for each of us.

The loons darted forward at full speed; but the two
fish made no effort to escape, and did not even wriggle
when the long, sharp bills closed upon them. They were
dead, choked to death by the fine threads of a gill-net.
And now those same threads laid hold of the loons themselves,
and a fearful struggle began.

Mahng and his wife did not always keep their wings
folded when they were under water. Sometimes they
used them almost as they did in flying, and just now they
had need of every muscle in their bodies. How their
pinions lashed the water, and how their legs kicked and
their long necks writhed, and how the soft mud rose in
clouds and shut out the dim light! But the harder they
fought the more tightly did the net grapple them, winding
itself round and round their bodies, and soon lashing
their wings down against their sides. Expert divers[190]
though they were, the loons were drowning. There was
a ringing in their ears and a roaring in their heads, and
the very last atoms of oxygen in their lungs were almost
gone. Death was drawing very near, and the bright,
sunshiny world where they had been so happy a moment
before, the world to which they had thought they could
return so quickly and easily, seemed a thousand miles
away. One last effort, one final struggle, and if that
failed there would be nothing more to do but go to sleep
forever.

Fortunately for Mahng, his part of the net had been
mildewed, and much of the strength had gone out of the
linen threads. He was writhing and twisting with all his
might, and suddenly he felt something give. One of the
rotten meshes had torn apart. He worked with redoubled
energy, and in a moment another thread gave way, and
then another, and another. A second more and he was
free. Quick, now, before the last spark goes out! With
beating wings and churning paddles he fairly flew up
through the green water toward the light, and on a sudden
he shot out into the air, panting and gasping, and staring
wildly around at the blue sky, and the quiet woods,
and the smiling Glimmerglass. And how royally beautiful[191]
was the sunshine, and how sweet was the breath
of life!

But his mate was not with him, and a few hours later
the fisherman found in his net the lifeless body of a
drowned loon.

Mahng went north. He had thought that his spring
flight was over and that he would go no farther, but now
the Glimmerglass was no longer home, and he spread his
wings once more and took his way toward the Arctic
Circle. Over the hills, crowded with maple and beech
and birch; over the Great Tahquamenon Swamp, with
its cranberry marshes, its tangles of spruce and cedar, and
its thin, scattered ranks of tamarack; over the sandy
ridges where the pine-trees stand tall and stately, and out
on Lake Superior. The water was blue, and the sunshine
was bright; the wind was fresh and cool, and the billows
rolled and tumbled as if they were alive and were having
a good time together. Together—that’s the word.
They were together, but Mahng was alone; and he wasn’t
having a good time at all. He wanted a home, and a
nest, and some young ones, but he didn’t find them that
year, though he went clear to Hudson Bay, and looked
everywhere for a mate. There were loons, plenty of[192]
them, but they had already paired and set up housekeeping,
and he found no one who was in a position to halve
his sorrows and double his joys.

Something attracted his attention one afternoon when
he was swimming on a little lake far up in the Canadian
wilderness—a small red object that kept appearing and
disappearing in a very mysterious fashion among the
bushes that lined the beach. Mahng’s bump of curiosity
was large and well developed, and he gave one of his best
laughs and paddled slowly in toward the shore. I think
he had a faint and utterly unreasonable hope that it might
prove to be what he was looking and longing for, though
he knew very well that no female loon of his species ever
had red feathers—nor a male, either, for that matter. It
was a most absurd idea, and his dreams, if he really had
them, were cut short by the report of a shotgun. A little
cloud of smoke floated up through the bushes, and a
charge of heavy shot peppered the water all around him.
But if Mahng was curious he was also quick to take a
hint. He had heard the click of the gun-lock, and before
the leaden hail could reach him he was under water.
His tail feathers suffered a little, but otherwise he was
uninjured, and he did not come to the surface again[193]
till he was far away from that deceitful red handkerchief.

The summer was an entire failure, and after a while
Mahng gave it up in despair, and started south much
earlier than usual. At the Straits of Mackinac he had
another narrow escape, for he came very near killing himself
by dashing head first against the lantern of a lighthouse,
whose brilliant beams, a thousand times brighter
than the light which had lured his first wife to her death,
had first attracted and then dazzled and dazed him.
Fortunately he swerved a trifle at the last moment, and
though he brushed against an iron railing, lost his balance,
and fell into the water, there were no bones broken
and no serious damage done.

The southland, as everybody knows, is the only proper
place for a loon courtship. There, I am pleased to say,
Mahng found a new wife, and in due time he brought her
up to the Glimmerglass. That was only last spring,
and there is but one more incident for me to relate.
This summer has been a happy and prosperous one, but
there was a time when it seemed likely to end in disaster
before it had fairly begun.

Just northeast of the Glimmerglass there lies a long,[194]
narrow, shallow pond. I believe I mentioned it when I
was telling you about the Beaver. One afternoon Mahng
had flown across to this pond, and as he was swimming
along close to the shore he put his foot into a beaver-trap,
and sprung it. Of course he did his best to get
away, but the only result of his struggling was to work
the trap out into deeper and deeper water until he was
almost submerged. He made things almost boil with the
fierce beating of his wings, but it was no use; he might
better have saved his strength. He quieted down at last
and lay very still, with only his head and neck out of
water, and there he waited two mortal hours for something
to happen.

Meanwhile his wife sat quietly on her eggs—there were
three of them this year—and drowsed away the warm
spring afternoon. By and by she heard a tramping as of
heavy feet approaching, and glancing between the tall
grasses she saw, not a bear nor a deer, but something far
worse—a man. She waited till he was within a few
yards, and then she jumped up, scuttled down to the
water as fast as she could go, and dived as if she was
made of lead. The trapper glanced after her with a
chuckle.[195]

“Seems pretty badly scared,” he said to himself, but
his voice was not unkindly. His smile faded as he stood
a moment beside the nest, looking at the eggs, and thinking
of what would some day come forth from them. He
was a solitary old fellow, with never a wife nor a child,
nor a relation of any kind. His life in the woods was
just what he had chosen for himself, and he would not
have exchanged it for anything else in the world; but
sometimes the loneliness of it came over him, and he
wished that he had somebody to talk to. And now,
looking at those eggs, and thinking of the fledglings that
were coming to the loons, he wondered how it would seem
if he had some children of his own. Pretty soon he
glanced out on the lake again, and saw Mahng’s wife
sitting quietly on the water, just out of range.

“Hope she won’t stay away till they get cold,” he
thought, and went on his way across the swamp. The
loon watched him till he passed out of sight, and then
she swam in to the beach and pushed herself up her
narrow runway to her old place. The eggs were still
warm.

Half an hour later the trapper stepped out of the
bushes beside the pond, and caught sight of Mahng’s head[196]
sticking out of the water. He was considerably astonished,
but he promptly laid hold of the chain and drew
bird, trap, and all up onto the bank, and then he sat
down on a log and laughed till the echoes went flying
back and forth across the pond. Plastered with mud,
dripping wet, and with his left leg fast in the big steel
killing-machine, Mahng was certainly a comical sight.
All the fight was soaked out of him, and he lay prone
upon the ground and waited for the trapper to do what he
pleased. But the trapper did nothing—only sat on his
log, and presently forgot to laugh. He was thinking of
the sitting loon whom he had disturbed a little while before.
This was probably her mate, and again there came
over him a vague feeling that life had been very good to
these birds, and had given them something which he, the
man, had missed. He was growing old. A few more
seasons and there would be one trapper less in the Great
Tahquamenon Swamp; and he would die without—well,
what was the use of talking or thinking about it? But
the loons would hatch their young, and care for them and
protect them until they were ready to go out into the
world, and then they would send them away to the south.
A few weeks later they would follow, and next spring[197]
they would come back and do it all over again. That is—they
would if he didn’t kill them.

He rose from his log, smiling again at the abject look
with which Mahng watched him, and putting one foot on
each of the two heavy steel springs, he threw his weight
upon them and crushed them down. Mahng felt the
jaws relax, and suddenly he knew that he was free. The
strength came back with a rush to his weary limbs, and
he sprang up, scrambled down the bank and into the
water, and was gone. A few minutes later he reappeared
far down the pond, and rising on the wing he flew away
with a laugh toward the Glimmerglass.

[199]

THE MAKING OF A GLIMMERGLASS BUCK

[201]

He had a good start in life, and it is really no wonder
that he distanced all his relations. In the first place, he
arrived in the woods a little earlier in the year than deer
babies usually do. This was important, for it lengthened
his first summer, and gave more opportunity for growth[202]
before the return of cold weather. If the winter had
lingered, or if there had been late frosts or snow-storms,
his early advent might have been anything but a blessing;
but the spring proved a mild one, and there was plenty of
good growing weather for fawns. Then, too, his mother
as in the very prime of life, and for the time being he
was her only child. If there had been twins, as there
were the year before, he would, of course, have had to
share her milk with a brother or sister; but as it was
he enjoyed all the benefits of a natural monopoly, and he
grew and prospered accordingly, and was a baby to be
proud of.

“He was a baby to be proud of.”

And his mother took good care of him, and never tried
to show him off before the other people of the woods.
She knew that it was far safer and wiser to keep him concealed
as long as possible, and not let anyone know that
she had him. So instead of letting him wander with her
through the woods when she went in search of food, she
generally left him hidden in a thicket or behind a bush or
a fallen tree. There he spent many a long, lonely hour,
idly watching the waving branches and the moving shadows,
and perhaps thinking dim, formless, wordless baby
thoughts, or looking at nothing and thinking of nothing,[203]
but just sleeping the quiet sleep of infancy, and living,
and growing, and getting ready for hard times.

At first the Fawn knew no difference between friends
and enemies, but the instinct of the hunted soon awoke
and told him when to be afraid. If a hostile animal came
by while the doe was gone, he would crouch low, with his
nose to the ground and his big ears laid back on his neck;
or if pressed too closely he would jump up and hurry away
to some better cover, with leaps and bounds so light and
airy that they seemed the very music of motion. But
that did not happen very often. His hiding-places were
well chosen, and he usually lay still till his mother came
back.

When she thought he was large enough, and strong
and swift enough, she let him travel with her; and then
he became acquainted with several new kinds of forest—with
the dark hemlock groves, and the dense cedar swamps;
with the open tamarack, where the trees stand wide apart,
and between them the great purple-and-white lady’s-slippers
bloom; with the cranberry marshes, where pitcher-plants
live, and white-plumed grasses nod in the breeze;
with sandy ridges where the pine-trees purr with pleasure
when the wind strokes them; with the broad, beautiful[204]
Glimmerglass, laughing and shimmering in the sunshine,
and with all the sights and the sounds of that wonderful
world where he was to spend the years of his deerhood.

They were a very silent pair. When his breakfast was
ready she would sometimes call him with a low murmuring,
and he would answer her with a little bleat; but
those were almost the only sounds that were ever heard
from them, except the rustling of the dry leaves around
their feet. Yet they understood each other perfectly,
and they were very happy together. There was little
need of speech, for all they had to do the livelong day
was to wander about while the doe picked up her food,
and then, when she had eaten her fill, to lie down in some
sheltered place, and there rest and chew the cud till it
was time to move again.

Life wasn’t all sunshine, of course. There were plenty
of hard things for the baby Buck to put up with, and
perhaps the worst were the mosquitoes and the black-flies
and “no-see-’ems” that swarmed in the woods and
swamps through the month of June. They got into his
mouth and into his nose; they gathered in circles around
his eyes; and they snuggled cosily down between the
short hairs of his pretty, spotted coat, and sucked the[205]
blood out of him till it seemed as if he would soon go
dry. For a while they were almost unbearable, but I
suppose the woods-people get somewhat hardened to
them. Otherwise I should think our friends would have
been driven mad, for there was never any respite from
their attacks, except possibly a very stormy day, or a
bath in the lake, or a saunter on the shore.

At the eastern end of the Glimmerglass there is a
broad strip of sand beach, where, if there happens to be
a breeze from the water, one can walk and be quite free
from the flies; though in calm weather, or with an offshore
wind, it is not much better than the woods.
There, during fly-time, the doe and her baby were often
to be found; and to see him promenading up and down
the hard sand, with his mother looking on, was one of
the prettiest sights in all the wilderness. The ground-color
of his coat was a bright bay red, somewhat like that
of his mother’s summer clothing; but deeper and richer
and handsomer, and with pure white spots arranged in
irregular rows all along his neck and back and sides. He
was so sleek and polished that he fairly glistened in the
sunshine, like a well-groomed horse; his great dark eyes
were brighter than a girl’s at her first ball; and his ears[206]
were almost as big as a mule’s, and a million times as
pretty. But best and most beautiful of all was the marvellous
life and grace and spirit of his every pose and
motion. When he walked, his head and neck were
thrust forward and drawn back again at every step with
the daintiest gesture imaginable; and his tiny pointed
hoofs touched the ground so lightly, and were away again
so quickly, that you hardly knew what they had done.
If anything startled him, he stamped with his forefoot on
the hard sand, and tossed his head in the air with an expression
that was not fear, but alertness, and even defiance.
And when he leaped and ran—but there’s no use
in trying to describe that.

By the middle of July most of the flies were gone, and
the deer could travel where they pleased without being
eaten alive. And then, almost before they knew what
had happened, the summer was gone, too, and the autumn
had come. The Fawn’s white spots disappeared, and both
he and his mother put off their thin red summer clothing
and donned the blue coat of fall, which would by and by
fade into the gray of winter—a garment made of longer,
coarser hairs, which were so thick that they had to stand
on end because there wasn’t room for them to lie down,[207]
and which made such a warm covering that one who
wore it could sleep all night in the snow, and rise in the
morning dry and comfortable.

The Fawn had thriven wonderfully. Already the
budding antlers were pushing through the skin on the
top of his head, which alone is pretty good proof that he
was a remarkable baby. But, of course, the infancy of a
wild animal is always much shorter than that of a human
child. It is well that this is so, for if the period of weakness
and helplessness was not shortened for them, there
would probably be very few who would ever survive its
dangers and reach maturity. The Fawn was weaned
early in the autumn; though he still ran with his mother,
and she showed him what herbs and leaves were pleasantest
to the taste and best for building up bone and muscle,
and where the beechnuts were most plentiful. The
mast was good that fall, which isn’t always the case, and
that was another lucky star in young Buck’s horoscope.
So much depends on having plenty to eat the first year.

And now the doe was thriving as well as her son.
Through the summer she had been thin and poor, for the
Fawn had fed on her life and strength, and the best of
all that came to her she had given to him; but the strain[208]
was over at last, and there were granted her a few weeks
in which to prepare for the season of cold and storm and
scanty food. She made the best of them, and in an
amazingly short time she was rolling fat.

Everything was lovely and the goose hung high, when
all of a sudden the peace and quiet of their every-day
lives were rudely broken. The hunting season had come,
and half-a-dozen farmers from lower Michigan had
camped beside the Glimmerglass. They were not really
very formidable. If one wants to kill deer, one should
learn to shoot straight and to get around in the woods
without making quite as much noise as a locomotive.
But their racket was intolerable, and after a day or two
the doe and the Fawn left home and spent the next three
or four weeks near a secluded little pond several miles
away to the southeast.

By the first of December these troublous times were
over, and they had returned to their old haunts in the
beech and maple woods, where they picked up a rather
scanty living by scraping the light snow away with
their forefeet in search of the savory nuts. But before
Christmas there came a storm which covered the ground
so deeply that they could no longer dig out enough food[209]
to keep them from going hungry; and they were forced
to leave the high lands and make their way to the evergreen
swamps around the head-waters of the Tahquamenon.
There they lived on twigs of balsam and hemlock
and spruce, with now and then a mouthful of moss
or a nutritious lichen. Little by little the fat on their
ribs disappeared, they grew lank and lean again, and the
bones showed more and more plainly through their heavy
winter coats. If one of those November hunters had
succeeded in setting his teeth in their flesh he would have
found that it had a very pleasant, nutty flavor, but in
February it would have tasted decidedly of hemlock.
Yet they were strong and healthy, in spite of their boniness,
and of course you can’t expect to be very fat in
winter.

There were worse things than hunger. One afternoon
they were following a big buck down a runway—all
three of them minding their own business and behaving
in a very orderly and peaceable manner—when a shanty-boy
stepped out from behind a big birch just ahead of
them, and said, “Aah!” very derisively and insultingly.
The wind was blowing from them to him, and they hadn’t
had the least idea that he was there until they were within[210]
three rods of his tree. The buck was so startled that
for an instant he simply stood still and stared, which
was exactly what the shanty-boy had expected him to
do. He had stopped so suddenly that his forefeet were
thrust forward into the snow, and he was leaning backward
a trifle. His head was up, his eyes were almost
popping out of their sockets, and there was such a look
of astonishment on his face that the man laughed as he
raised his gun and took aim. In a second the deer had
wheeled and was in the air, but a bullet broke his back
just as he left the ground, and he came tumbling down
again in a shapeless heap. His spinal cord was cut, and
half his body was dead; but he would not give up even
then, and he half rose on his forefeet and tried to drag
himself away. The shanty-boy stepped to his side with
a knife in his hand, the deer gave one loud bleat of fear
and pain, and then it was all over.

But by that time the doe and the Fawn were far down
the runway—out of sight, and out of danger. Next
day they passed that way again, and saw a Canada lynx
standing where the buck had fallen, licking his chops as
if he had just finished a good meal. It is hard work
carrying a deer through the woods, and the shanty-boy[211]
had lightened his load as much as possible. Lynxes are
not nice. The mother and son pulled their freight as
fast as they could travel.

When the world turned green again they went back to
the Glimmerglass, but they had not been there long before
the young Buck had his nose put out of joint by the
arrival of two new babies. Thenceforth his mother had
all she could do to take care of them, without paying any
further attention to him. The days of his fawnhood
were over, and it was time for him to strike out into the
world and make his own living.

However, I don’t think he was very lonesome. There
were plenty of other deer in the woods, and though he
did not associate with any of them as he had with his
mother, yet he may have enjoyed meeting them occasionally
in his travels. And there was ever so much to do
and to think about. Eating took up a good deal of
time, for he was very active and was still growing, and
his strong young body was constantly calling for more
food. And it wasn’t enough merely to find the food and
swallow it, for no sooner was his stomach full than he
had to lie down and chew the cud for an hour or so.
And, of course, the black-flies and mosquitoes and “no-see-’ems”[212]
helped to make things interesting, just as they
had the year before. Strictly speaking, it is impossible
to be lonely in the woods during fly-time. He changed
his clothes, too, and put on a much handsomer dress,
though I doubt if he took as much interest in that operation
as most of us would. The change contributed
greatly to his comfort, for his light summer garment was
much better adapted to warm weather than his winter
coat, but it did not require any conscious effort on his
part. On hot days he sometimes waded out into the
lake in search of lily-pads, and the touch of the cool
water was very grateful. Occasionally he would take a
long swim, and once or twice he paddled clear across the
Glimmerglass, from one shore to the other.

And it was during this summer that he raised his first
real antlers. Those of the previous autumn had been
nothing but two little buds of bone, but these were
pointed spikes, several inches in length, standing straight
up from the top of his head without a fork or a branch or
a curve. They did not add very much to his good looks,
and, of course, they dropped off early in the following
winter, but they were the forerunners of the beautiful
branching antlers of his later years, and if he thought[213]
about them at all they were probably as welcome as a
boy’s first mustache.

Late in the following autumn an event occurred which
left its mark on him for the rest of his life. One night
he wandered into a part of the woods where some lumbermen
had been working during the day. On the ground
where they had eaten their lunch he found some baked
beans and a piece of dried apple-pie, and he ate them
greedily and was glad that he had come. But he found
something else, too. One of the road-monkeys had carelessly
left his axe in the snow with the edge turned up.
The Buck stepped on it, and it slipped in between the
two halves of his cloven hoof, and cut deep into his foot.
The wound healed in the course of time, but from that
night the toes—they were those of his left hind foot—were
spread far apart, instead of lying close together as
they should have done. Sticks and roots sometimes
caught between them in a way that was very annoying,
and his track was different from that of any other deer in
the woods, which was not a thing to be desired. He was
not crippled, however, for he could still leap almost, if not
quite, as far as ever, and run almost as fast.

He continued to grow and prosper, and the next[214]
summer he raised a pair of forked antlers with two
tines each.

And now he is well started down the runway of life,
and we must leave him to travel by himself for two or
three years. He ranged the woods far and near, and
came to know them as a man knows his own house; but
no matter what places he visited, the old haunts that his
mother had shown him were the best of all, as the deer
have learned by the experience of generation after generation.
He always came back again to the Glimmerglass,
and as the seasons went by I often saw his broad, spreading
hoof-print on the sandy beach where they two had so
often walked in that first summer. He evidently had
plenty of company, and was probably enjoying life, for
all around were other foot-prints that were narrow and
delicately pointed, as a deer’s should be. Some of them,
of course, were his own, left by his three perfect feet; but
others were those of his friends and acquaintances, and it
is quite possible that some of the tiniest and daintiest
were made by his children.

That beach is a delightful place for a promenade on a
summer night, and besides the deer-tracks one can sometimes
find there the trails of the waddling porcupines, the[215]
broad, heavy print left by a black bear as he goes shambling
by, and the handwriting of many another of the
woods-people. Strange and interesting scenes must often
be enacted on the smooth, hard sand that lies between the
woods and the water, and it is a pity that the show always
comes to a sudden close if any would-be spectators
appear, and that we never see anything but the foot-prints
of the performers.

With each recurring hunting season the Buck and the
other deer that made their homes around the Glimmerglass
were driven away for a time. A few stayed, or at
least remained as near as they dared; but compared with
summer the neighborhood was almost depopulated. And
in his fourth year, in spite of all his efforts to keep out
of harm’s way, the Buck came very near losing his life at
the hands of a man who had really learned how to hunt—not
one of the farmers who went ramming about the
woods, shooting at everything in sight, and making noise
enough to startle even the porcupines.

One afternoon, late in the autumn, the judge left his
court-room in Detroit and started for his house. He
bought an evening paper as he boarded the street-car;
and, as Fate would have it, the first thing that met his[216]
eye as he unfolded it was the forecast for upper Michigan:
“Colder; slight snow-fall; light northerly winds.”
The judge folded the paper again and put it in his
pocket, and all the rest of the way home he was dreaming
of things that he had seen before—of the white and
silent woods, of deer-tracks in the inch-deep snow, of the
long still-hunt under dripping branches and gray November
skies, of a huge buck feeding unconcernedly beneath
the beech-trees, of nutty venison steaks broiling on the
coals, and, finally, of another pair of antlers for his dining-room.
Court had adjourned for three days, and that
night he took the train for the north. And while he
travelled, the snow came down softly and silently, melting
at first as fast as it fell, and then, as the cold grew
sharper, clothing the woods in a thin, white robe, the first
gift of the coming winter.

Next day the Buck was lying behind a fallen tree,
chewing his cud, when the breeze brought him a whiff of
an unpleasant human odor. He jumped up and hurried
away, and the judge heard him crash through the bushes,
and searched until he had found his trail. An hour
later, as the Buck was nosing for beechnuts in the snow,
a rifle cracked and a bullet went zipping by and carried[217]
off the very tip of his left antler. He dropped his white
flag and was off like a shot.

Chase a wounded deer, and he will run for miles; leave
him alone, and if he is badly hurt he will soon lie down.
The chances are that he will never get up again. The
judge knew that the Buck was hit, for he had seen his
tail come down. But was he hit hard? There was no
blood on the trail, and the judge decided to follow.

The Buck hurried on, but before long his leaps began
to grow shorter. After a mile or so he stopped, looked
back, and listened. The woods were very, very still, and
for all that he could see or hear there was not the least
sign of danger. Yet he was afraid, and in a few minutes
he pushed on again, though not as rapidly as
before. As the short afternoon wore away he travelled
still more slowly, and his stops were longer and more
frequent. And at last, just before sunset, as he stood
and watched for the enemy who might or might not be
on his trail, he heard a twig snap, and saw a dark form
slip behind a tree. This time he ran as he had never
run before in all his life.

The judge spent the night at the nearest lumber-camp,
and the next morning he was out again as soon as he[218]
could see, following his own trail back to where he had
left that of the Buck. On the way he crossed the tracks
of two other deer, but they had no temptations for him.
He wanted to solve the mystery of that spreading hoof-print,
and to make sure that his shot had not been a clean
miss. And now began a day which was without precedent
in the Buck’s whole history. Those woods are not the
best in the world for a deer who has to play hide-and-seek
with a man, for there are few bare ridges or half-wooded
slopes from which he can look back to see if anyone is
following him. Even the glades and the open cranberry
swamps are small and infrequent. An almost unbroken
forest sweeps away in every direction, and everywhere
there is cover for the still-hunter. And when the ground
is carpeted with snow an inch and a half deep, as it was
then, and at every step a deer must leave behind him a
trail as plain as a turnpike road, then it is not strange if
he feels that he has run up against a decidedly tough
proposition. Eyes, ears, and nose are all on the alert, and
all doing their level best, but what eye can penetrate the
cedar swamp beyond a few yards; or what ear can always
catch the tread of a moccasin on the moss and the snow
before it comes within rifle range; or what nose, no matter[219]
how delicate, can detect anything but what happens
to lie in its owner’s path, or what the wind chooses to
bring it? Many a foe had crossed the Buck’s trail in the
course of his life; but none had ever followed him like
this—silently and relentlessly—slowly, but without a moment’s
pause. A few leaps were always enough to put
the judge out of sight, and half an hour’s run left him
far behind; but in a little while he was there again,
creeping cautiously through the undergrowth, and peering
this way and that for a glimpse of a plump, round,
blue-gray body. Once he fired before the deer knew that
he was at hand, and if a hanging twig had not turned
the bullet a trifle from its course, the still-hunt would
have ended then and there.

But late in the afternoon the Buck thought that he
had really shaken his pursuer off, and the judge was beginning
to think so, too. They had not seen each other
for two or three hours, the day was nearly over, and
there were signs of a change in the weather. If the Buck
could hold out till nightfall, and then the snow should
melt before morning, he would be comparatively safe.

In his fear of the enemy lurking in the rear, he had
forgotten all other dangers; and without quite realizing[220]
what he was doing he had come back to the Glimmerglass,
and was tramping once more up and down the old
familiar runways. Presently he came upon a huge maple,
lying prostrate on the ground. He walked around its
great bushy head and down toward its foot; and there
he found a broad, saucer-shaped hollow, left when the
tree was torn up by the roots in some wild gale. On one
side rose a mass of earth, straight as a stone wall and
four or five feet in height; and against its foot lay one
of the most tempting beds of dead leaves that he had ever
seen, free from snow, dry as a whistle, soft and downy.
The sight of it was too much for him. He was very
weary, his limbs fairly ached with fatigue, and for the
last hour his spread hoof had given him a good deal of
pain. His enemy was nowhere in sight, and in spite of
his misgivings he sank down on the couch with a sigh of
comfort, and began to chew his cud.

The judge was about ready to give up for the night
when he, too, came upon that fallen maple. He saw the
wall of earth and twisted roots, with the deer-tracks leading
toward it; and slowly, softly, silently, he crept down
toward the Buck’s shelter.

There was no wind that evening, and the woods seemed[221]
perfectly still; but now, unnoticed by the judge, a faint,
faint puff came wandering among the trees, as if on purpose
to warn the deer of his danger. Suddenly he started,
sniffed the air, and was up and away like a race-horse—not
leaping nor bounding now, but running low, with his
head down, and his antlers laid back on his neck. If he
had been in the cedar swamp he would have escaped unhurt,
but up in the hardwood the trees do not stand so
close, and one can see a little farther. The judge fired
before he could get out of sight, and he dropped with
three ribs broken and a bullet lodged behind his right
shoulder. He was up again in an instant, but there
were blood-stains on the snow where he had lain, and
this time the judge did not follow. Instead of giving
chase he went straight back to the lumber-camp, feeling
almost as sure of that new pair of antlers as if he had
carried them with him.

The Buck ran a little way, with his flag lowered and
the blood spurting, and then he lay down to rest, just as
the judge knew he would. The bleeding soon stopped,
but it left him very weak and tired, and that night was
the most miserable he had ever known. The darkness
settled down thick and black over the woods, the wind[222]
began to blow, and by and by the rain commenced to
fall—first a drizzle, and then a steady pour. Cold and
wet, wounded and tired and hungry, the Buck was about
as wretched as it is possible for a mortal to be. And
yet that rain was the one and only thing that could
save him. Under its melting touch the snow began to
disappear, and before morning the ground was bare again.
Even the blood-stains were washed away. It would take
a better nose than the judge’s to track him now.

Yet the danger was not over, by any means. The
judge knew very nearly where to look for him, and could
probably find him if he did not get up and move on.
And to move on, or even to rise to his feet, seemed utterly
impossible. The least motion sent the most exquisite
pain shooting through his whole body, and I believe
he would have died where he lay, either at the hands of
the judge or from exhaustion, if another man hadn’t
come along. The judge would have advanced slowly and
quietly, and the deer might never have known he was
coming till a rifle bullet hit him; but this man’s errand
must have been a different one, for he came striding noisily
through the trees and bushes and over the dead leaves,
whistling “I Want Yer, Ma Honey,” at the top of his[223]
whistle. If you are obliged to be out in the woods during
the hunting season, and don’t care to kill anything,
it is always best to make as much noise as you can.
There is less danger that some other fool will take you
for a deer and shoot you dead. The Buck heard him, of
course, and tried to rise, only to sink back with a groan.
He couldn’t do it, or at least he thought he couldn’t.
But when the man came around a little balsam only two
rods away, then his panic got the better of his pain, and
he jumped up and made off at a clumsy, limping run.
Every joint seemed on fire, and he ached from the top of
his head to the toes of that poor left hind-foot. But
after the first plunge it was not quite so bad. The motion
took some of the stiffness out of his limbs, and by
the time the judge arrived he was a mile away and was
thinking about breakfast.

We must do the sportsman the justice of saying that
his remorse was very keen when he stepped aboard the
train that night, bound for Detroit. He had wounded a
deer and had let it get away from him, to suffer, and
probably to die a painful, lingering death. The whole
day—the last of the hunting season and of his court recess—had
been spent in an unavailing search; not merely[224]
because he wanted some venison and a pair of antlers to
carry home with him, but because he wanted to put the
Buck out of his misery. He had failed everywhere, and
he felt sorry and ashamed, and wished he had stayed at
home. But, as it happened, the Buck did not want to
be put out of his misery. Just as the judge took the
train he was lying down for the night. He would be
stiff when he rose again, but not as stiff as he had been
that morning. He would be weak and tired, but he
would still be able to travel and find food. He would
lose his plumpness and roundness, no doubt, and lose
them very rapidly. The winter would probably be a hard
one, with such a misfortune as this at its very beginning.
But no matter, it would pass. He wasn’t the first Buck
who had had his ribs smashed by an injection of lead and
had lived to tell the tale.

The next year it was his antlers that got him into
trouble—his antlers and his quarrelsomeness. Two
round, black, velvet-covered knobs had appeared in spring
on the top of his head, and had pushed up higher and
higher till they formed cylindrical columns, each one
leaning outward and a little backward. They were hot
as fever with the blood that was rushing through them,[225]
building up the living masonry; and at the upper ends,
where the work was newest, they were soft and spongy,
and very sensitive, so that the least touch was enough to
give pain. Longer and longer they grew, and harder
and harder; by and by curving forward and inward; and
one after another the tines appeared. And at last, in
the early autumn, the tall towers of bone were complete,
the blood ceased to course through them, and the Buck
rubbed them against the tree-trunks until the velvety
skin was all worn off, and they were left smooth and
brown and polished. They were a handsome pair, spreading
and branching very gracefully over his forehead, and
bearing four tines to each beam. It is a mistake to suppose,
as so many people do, that the number of tines on
each antler invariably corresponds to the number of years
that its owner has lived; but it very often does, especially
before he has passed the prime of life.

No sooner were the antlers finished than the Buck
began to grow fat. He had been eating heartily for
months, but he hadn’t been able to put much flesh on his
ribs as long as he had that big, bony growth to feed.
Bucks and does are alike in this, that for both of them
the summer is a season of plenty, but not of growing[226]
plump and round and strong. The difference between
them is that the does give their strength and vitality to
the children they are nursing, while the bucks pile theirs
up on their own foreheads.

“The buck was nearing the prime of life.”

And there was another change which came with the
autumn. Through the summer he had been quiet and
gentle, and had attended very strictly to his own affairs;
but now the life and vigor and vitality which for weeks
and months had been pouring into that tall, beautiful
structure on his forehead were all surging like a tide
through his whole body; and he became very passionate
and excitable, and spent much time in rushing about the
woods in search of other deer, fighting those of his own
sex, and making love to the does. The year was at its
high-water mark, and the Buck was nearing his prime.
Food was plenty; everywhere the beechnuts were dropping
on the dry leaves; the autumn sunshine was warm
and mellow; the woods were gay with scarlet and gold
and brown, and the very taste of the air was enough to
make one happy. Was it any wonder if he sometimes
felt as if he would like to fight every other buck in
Michigan, and all of them at once?

One afternoon in October he fought a battle with[227]
another buck who was very nearly his match in size and
strength—a battle that came near being the end of both
of them. There was a doe just vanishing among the
bushes when the fuss began, and the question at issue was
which should follow her and which shouldn’t. It would
be easy enough to find her, for, metaphorically speaking,
“her feet had touched the meadows, and left the daisies
rosy.” Wherever she went, a faint, faint fragrance clung
to the dead leaves, far too delicate for a human nose to
detect, yet quite strong enough for a buck to follow. But
the trail wasn’t broad enough for two, and the first thing
to be done was to have a scrap and see which was the
better and more deserving deer. And, as it turned
out, the scent grew cold again, and the doe never heard
that eager patter of hoofs hurrying down the runway
behind her.

The bucks came together like two battering-rams, with
a great clatter and clash of antlers, but after the first
shock the fight seemed little more than a pushing-match.
Each one was constantly trying to catch the other off his
guard and thrust a point into his flesh, but they never
succeeded. A pair of widely branching antlers is as useful
in warding off blows as in delivering them. Such a[228]
perfect shield does it make, when properly handled, that
at the end of half an hour neither of the bucks was suffering
from anything but fatigue, and the issue was as far as
ever from being settled. There was foam on their lips,
and sweat on their sides; their mouths were open, and
their breath came in gasps; every muscle was working its
hardest, pushing and shoving and guarding; and they
drove each other backward and forward through the
bushes, and ploughed up the ground, and scattered the dry
leaves in their struggles; and yet there was not a scratch
on either shapely body.

Finally, they backed off and rushed together again with
such violence that our Buck’s antlers were forced apart
just a trifle, and his enemy’s slipped in between them.
There was a little snap as they sprang back into position,
and the mischief was done. The two foes were locked
together in an embrace which death itself could not
loosen.

The next few weeks were worse than a nightmare. If
one went forward, the other had to go backward; and
neither could go anywhere or do anything without getting
the consent of the other or else carrying him along
by main force. Many things could not be done at all—not[229]
even when both were willing and anxious to do them.
They could not run or leap. They could not see, except
out of the corners of their eyes. They would never again
toss those beautiful antlers in the air, for they had come
together with their heads held low, and in that position
they must remain. They could not even lie down without
twisting their necks till they ached as if they were breaking.
With their noses to the ground, and with anger
and misery in their hearts, they pushed and hauled each
other this way and that through the woods. And wherever
they went, they were always struggling and fighting
and striving for every mouthful of food that came within
reach. It was little enough that they found at the best,
and it would have been better for both of them if they
could have agreed to divide it evenly, but of course that
would have been asking too much of deer nature. Each
took all he could get, and at first they were so evenly
matched that each secured somewhere near his fair share.
They spied a beechnut on the ground, or a bit of lichen,
or a tender twig; and together they made a dive for it.
Two noses were thrust forward—no, not forward, sidewise—and
two mouths were open to grasp the precious
morsel which would enable its possessor to keep up the[230]
fight a little longer. Sometimes one got it, and sometimes
the other; but from the very beginning our Buck
was a shade the stronger, and his superiority grew with
every mouthful that he managed to wrest from his fellow-prisoner.
Both of them were losing flesh rapidly, but he
kept his longer than the other. And at last they reached
the point where, by reason of his greater strength, he got
everything and the other nothing, and then the end was
near. It would have come long before if both had not
been in prime condition on the day of the battle.

“Wherever they went they were always struggling and fighting.”

One dark, stormy night the two deer were stumbling
and floundering over roots and bushes, trying to find
their way down to the beach for a drink. Both of them
were pretty well used up; and one was so weak that he
could hardly stand, and could only walk by leaning
heavily on the head and antlers of the other, who supported
him because he was obliged to, and not out of
friendliness. They were within a few rods of the beach
when he whose strength was least stepped into a hole and
fell, and his leg-bone snapped like a dry twig. He struggled
and tried to rise; but his story was told, and before
morning he was dead. For once our Buck’s instinct of
self-preservation had carried him too far. He had taken[231]
all the food for himself, and had starved his enemy; and
now he was bound face to face to a corpse.

Well, we won’t talk about that. He stayed there
twenty-four hours, and there would soon have been two
dead bucks instead of one if something had not happened
which he did not in the least expect—something which
seemed like a blessed miracle, yet which was really the simplest
and most natural thing in the world. A buck has no
fixed time for the casting of his antlers. It usually occurs
during the first half of the winter, but it has been known
to take place as early as November and as late as April.
The second night passed, and as it began to grow light
again our friend lifted himself on his knees and his hind-legs,
and wrestled mightily with his horrible bed-fellow;
and suddenly his left antler came loose from his head.
The right one was still fast, but it was easily disengaged
from the tangle of branching horns, and in a moment he
stood erect. The blood was running down his face from
the pedicel where the antler had stood, and he was so
weak and dizzy that his legs could hardly carry him, and
so thin and wasted that he seemed the mere shadow of
his former self. But he was free, and that long, horrible
dream was over at last.[232]

He tried to walk toward the lake, but fell before he
had taken half-a-dozen steps; and for an hour he lay
still and rested. It was like a taste of heaven, just to be
able to hold his neck straight. The sun had risen by the
time he was ready to try it again, and through the trees
he saw the shimmer and sparkle of the Glimmerglass. He
heard the wind talking to itself in the branches overhead,
and the splashing of the ripples on the beach;
and he staggered down to the margin and drank long
and deep.

That December was a mild one. The first light snow
had already come and gone, and the next two weeks were
bright and sunshiny. The Buck ate as he had never
eaten before, and it was astonishing to see how rapidly
he picked up, and how much he gained before Christmas.
His good luck seemed to follow him month after month,
for the winter was comparatively open, the snow was not
as deep as usual, and the spring came early. By that
time the ill effects of his terrible experience had almost
entirely disappeared, and he was in nearly as good condition
as is usual with the deer at that season of the year—which,
of course, isn’t really saying very much.

Again, Nature’s table was spread with good things, and[233]
again he set to work to build a pair of antlers—a pair
that should be larger and handsomer than any that had
gone before. But as the summer lengthened it became
evident that there was something wrong with those antlers,
or at least with one of them. One seemed to be quite
perfect. It was considerably longer than those of last
year, its curve was just right, and it had five tines, which
was the correct number and all that he could have asked.
But the other, the left, was nothing but a straight, pointed
spike, perhaps eight inches in length, shaped almost exactly
like those of his first pair. The Buck never knew
the reason for this deformity, and I’m not at all certain
about it myself, though I have a theory. One
stormy day in the early summer, a falling branch, torn
from a tree-top by the wind, had struck squarely on that
growing antler, then only a few inches long. It hurt him
so that for a moment he was fairly blind and dizzy, and
it is quite possible that the soft, half-formed bone was so
injured that it could never reach its full development.
Anyhow, it made him a rather queer-looking buck, with
one perfect antler and one spike. But in everything else—except
his spread hoof—he was without spot or blemish.
He had well fulfilled the promise of his youth, and[234]
he was big and strong and beautiful. Something he had
lost, no doubt, of the grace and daintiness of his baby
days; but he had also gained much—gained in stateliness
and dignity, as well as in size and weight and strength.
And even that spike antler was not without its advantages,
as he learned a little later.

As the autumn came round he was just as excitable and
passionate, just as ready for fighting or love-making, as
ever, and not one whit subdued by the disaster of the
year before. And so one day he had another battle with
another buck, while another doe—or perhaps the same
one—made off through the trees and left a fragrant trail
behind her. He and his adversary went at each other in
the usual way, and for some time it seemed unlikely that
either of them could ever do anything more than tire the
other out by hard pushing. There was little danger that
their antlers would get locked this time, with one pair so
badly mismated; and it bade fair to be a very ordinary,
every-day sort of a fight. But by and by our Buck saw
his opportunity. The enemy exposed his left side, in an
unguarded moment, and before he could recover himself
that deformed antler had dealt him a terrible thrust. If
the force of the blow had been divided among five tines[235]
it would probably have had but little effect, but the single
straight spike was as good as a sword or a bayonet, and
it won the day. The deer with the perfect antlers was
not only vanquished, but killed; and the victor was off on
the trail of the doe.

And so our friend became the champion of the Glimmerglass,
and in all the woods there was not a buck that
could stand against him.

But his brother deer were not his only enemies. With
the opening of the hunting season those farmers from
lower Michigan came again, and day after day they beat
the woods in search of game. This time, however, the
Buck did not leave, or at least he did not go very far.
For the last month he had been fighting everyone who
would fight back, and perhaps his many easy victories
had made him reckless. At any rate he was bolder than
usual, and all through the season he stayed within a few
miles of the Glimmerglass.

The farmers had decidedly poor luck, and after hunting
for two or three weeks without a single taste of venison
they began to feel desperate. Finally, they secured the
help of a trapper who owned a big English foxhound.
Hunting with dogs was against the law, and at home they[236]
claimed to be very law-abiding citizens, but they had to
have a deer, no matter what happened.

The morning after the hound’s arrival he got onto the
trail of a doe and followed it for hours, until, as a last
resort, she made for the Glimmerglass, jumped into the
water, and started to swim across to the farther shore.
The dog’s work was done, and he stood on the bank and
watched her go. For a few minutes she thought that she
was out of danger, and that the friendly Glimmerglass had
saved her; but presently she heard a sound of oars, and
turning half-way round she lifted her head and shoulders
out of the water, and saw a row-boat and three men bearing
down upon her. A look of horror came into her face
as she sank back, and her heart almost broke with despair;
but she was game, and she struck out with all her
might. Her legs tore the water frantically, the straining
muscles stood out like ropes on her sides and flanks and
shoulders, and she almost threw herself from the water.
But it was no use, the row-boat was gaining.

The farmers fired at her again and again, but they were
too wildly excited to hit anything until finally the trapper
pulled up alongside her and threw a noose over her head.
And then, while she lay on her side in the water, with the[237]
rope around her neck, kicking and struggling in a blind
agony of despair, one of the farmers shot her dead at a
range of something less than ten feet. When he went
home he bragged that he was the only one of the party
who had killed a deer, but he never told just how the
thing was done.

That is the kind of fate that you are very likely to
meet if you are a deer. But vengeance came on the morrow,
for that day it was the Buck’s turn to be chased by
that horrible fog-horn on four legs. Hour after hour he
heard the hound’s dreadful baying behind him as he raced
through the woods, and at last he, too, started for the
water, just as the doe had done. But he never reached it,
or at least not on that trip. He was within a few rods of
the beach when his spread hoof caught on a root and threw
him, and the hound was so close behind that they both
went down in a heap. They sprang to their feet at the
same instant, and stood for a second glaring at each other.
The dog had not meant to fight, only to drive the other
into the water, where the hunters would take care of him;
but he was game, and he made a spring at the deer’s
throat. The Buck drew back his forefoot, with its sharp,
pointed hoof, and met the enemy with a thrust like that[238]
of a Roman soldier’s short-sword; and the hound went
down with his shoulder broken and a great gash in his
side. And then, with a sudden twist and turn of his
head, the Buck caught him on the point of that terrible
spike antler, ripped his body open, and tossed him in
the air.

The worst enemy was disposed of. But that wasn’t all.
The man who killed the doe was waiting on the beach and
had heard the scuffle, and now he came creeping quietly
through the bushes to see what was going on. The
Buck was still trampling the body of the dog, and
noticed nothing till a rifle bullet grazed his right flank,
inflicting just enough of a wound to make him still more
furious. He faced around and stood for a moment staring
at this new enemy; and then he did something which
very few wild deer have ever done. Probably he would
not have done it himself if he had not been half crazy
with rage and excitement, and much emboldened by his
easy victory over the hound. He put his head down and
his antlers forward, and charged on a man!

The farmer was jerking frantically at the lever of his
repeating rifle, but a cartridge had stuck in the magazine,
and he couldn’t make it work. The hound’s fate had[239]
shown him what that spike antler could do; and when he
saw it bearing down on him at full tilt he dropped his
gun and ran for his life to his dug-out canoe. He reached
it just in time. I almost wish he hadn’t.

One more adventure the Buck had that fall. Providence,
or Fate, or someone took a hand in affairs, and rid
the Glimmerglass of all hunters, not for that season alone,
but for many years to come. One night, down beside a
spring in the cedar swamp, the Buck found a half-decayed
log on which a bag of salt had been emptied. He stayed
there for an hour or two, alternately licking the salt and
drinking the cold water, and it was as good as an ice-cream
soda. The next night he returned for another debauch;
but in the meantime two other visitors had been
there, and both had seen his tracks and knew that he
would come again. As he neared the spring, treading
noiselessly on the soft moss, he heard two little clicks, and
stopped short to see what they meant. Both were quick
and sharp, and both had come at exactly the same instant;
yet they were not quite alike, for one had come from the
shutter of a camera, and one from the lock of a rifle.
Across the salt-lick a photographer and a hunter were
facing each other in the darkness, and each saw the gleam[240]
of the other’s eyes and took him for a deer. So close
together were the two clicks that neither man heard the
sound of the other’s weapon, and both were ready to fire—each
in his own way.

The Buck stood and watched, and suddenly there came
two bursts of flame—one of them so big and bright that
it lit the woods like sheet-lightning. Two triggers had
been touched at the same instant, and each did its
work well. The flash-light printed on the sensitive
plate a picture of a hunter in the act of firing, and the
rifle sent a bullet straight through the photographer’s
forehead. The Buck saw it all as in a dream—the white
flame of the magnesium powder; the rifle, belching out
its fire and smoke; the camera, silent and harmless, but
working just as surely; the two men, each straining his
eyes for a sight of his game; the water gleaming in the
fierce light, and the dark ranks of the cedars all around.
And then, in the tenth of a second, it was all over, and
the Buck was bumping against trees, and stumbling and
floundering over roots, in his dazed haste to get away
from this terrifying mystery. He heard one horrified
shout from the hunter, but nothing from the photographer—and
the woods were silent again.[241]

That was the end of the hunting season at the Glimmerglass.
With the hunter’s trial for manslaughter, we
and the Buck are not concerned; and there is nothing
more to tell except that the next year the owners of the
lands around the lake gave warning that all trespassers
would be prosecuted. They wanted no more such tragedies
on their property.

And so the Buck and his sweethearts and his rivals
lived in peace, except that the rivals still quarrelled
among themselves, as Nature meant them to. The Buck
had reached his prime, but you are not to suppose that
he began to age immediately afterward. It was long before
his eye was dimmed or his natural force abated;
and as the years went by, with their summers of lily-pads
and tender young browse, and their autumns of beechnuts
and fighting and love-making, the broad cloven
track of his split foot was often to be found in the hard,
smooth sand of the beach. Perhaps it is there now. I
wish I could go and see.

THE END

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