even as I looked at him over the gun sight, Tookhees finished his
crumb, came to my foot, ran along my leg into my lap, and looked into my
face expectantly. The grizzled coat and the split ear showed the welcome
guest at my table for a week past. He was visiting the stranger colony,
as wood mice are fond of doing, and persuading them by his example that
they might trust me, as he did. More ashamed than if I had been caught
potting quail, I threw away the hateful shell that had almost slain my
friend and went back to camp.

There I made a mouse of a bit of muskrat fur, with a piece of my leather
shoestring sewed on for a tail. It served the purpose perfectly, for
within the hour I was gloating over the size and beauty of the big trout
as he stretched his length on the rock beside me. But I lost the fraud
at the next cast, leaving it, with a foot of my leader, in the mouth
of a second trout that rolled up at it the instant it touched his eddy
behind the rock.

After that the wood mice were safe so far as I was concerned. Not a
trout, though he were big as a salmon, would ever taste them, unless
they chose to go swimming of their own accord; and I kept their table
better supplied than before. I saw much of their visiting back and
forth, and have understood better what those tunnels mean that one finds
in the spring when the last snows are melting. In a corner of the woods,
where the drifts lay, you will often find a score of tunnels coming
in from all directions to a central chamber. They speak of Tookhees'
sociable nature, of his long visits with his fellows, undisturbed by
swoop or snap, when the packed snow above has swept the summer fear away
and made him safe from hawk and owl and fox and wildcat, and when no
open water tempts him to go swimming where Skooktum the big trout lies
waiting, mouse hungry, under his eddy.

The weeks passed all too quickly, as wilderness weeks do, and the sad
task of breaking camp lay just before us. But one thing troubled me--the
little Tookhees, who knew no fear, but tried to make a nest in the
sleeve of my flannel shirt. His simple confidence touched me more than
the curious ways of all the other mice. Every day he came and took his
crumbs, not from the common table, but from my, hand, evidently enjoying
its warmth while he ate, and always getting the choicest morsels. But I
knew that he would be the first one caught by the owl after I left;
for it is fear only that saves the wild th