g and throw it to the
ground. That also is usually a vain proceeding; for before Mooween can
scramble down after his game, Unk Wunk is already up another tree and
sleeping, as if nothing had happened, on another branch.

Other prowlers, with less strength and cunning than Mooween, fare badly
when driven by famine to attack this useless creature of the woods, for
whom Nature nevertheless cares so tenderly. Trappers have told me that
in the late winter, when hunger is sharpest, they sometimes catch a
wild-cat or lynx or fisher in their traps with his mouth and sides full
of porcupine quills, showing to what straits he had been driven for
food. These rare trapped animals are but an indication of many a silent
struggle that only the trees and stars are witnesses of; and the
trapper's deadfall, with its quick, sure blow, is only a merciful ending
to what else had been a long, slow, painful trail, ending at last under
a hemlock tip with the snow for a covering.

Last summer, in a little glade in the wilderness, I found two skeletons,
one of a porcupine, the other of a large lynx, lying side by side. In
the latter three quills lay where the throat had once been; the shaft of
another stood firmly out of an empty eye orbit; a dozen more lay about
in such a way that one could not tell by what path they had entered the
body. It needed no great help of imagination to read the story here of a
starving lynx, too famished to remember caution, and of a dinner that
cost a life.

Once also I saw a curious bit of animal education in connection with Unk
Wunk. Two young owls had begun hunting, under direction of the mother
bird, along the foot of a ridge in the early twilight. From my canoe I
saw one of the young birds swoop downward at something in the bushes on
the shore. An instant later the big mother owl followed with a sharp,
angry _hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!_ of warning. The youngster dropped into the
bushes; but the mother fairly knocked him away from his game in her
fierce rush, and led him away silently into the woods. I went over on
the instant, and found a young porcupine in the bushes where the owl had
swooped, while two more were eating lily stems farther along the shore.

Evidently Kookooskoos, who swoops by instinct at everything that moves,
must be taught by wiser heads the wisdom of letting certain things
severely alone.

That he needs this lesson was clearly shown by an owl that my friend
once shot at twilight. There was a por