where the path ran over a little brook,
I found a deadfall set squarely in the way of unwary feet. It was
different from any I had ever seen, and was made like this: {drawing
omitted}

That tiny stick (trigger, the trappers call it) with its end resting
in air three inches above the bed log, just the right height so that a
beaver or an otter would naturally put his foot on it in crossing, looks
innocent enough. But if you look sharply you will see that if it were
pressed down ever so little it would instantly release the bent stick
that holds the fall-log, and bring the deadly thing down with crushing
force across the back of any animal beneath.

Such are the pitfalls that lie athwart the way of Keeonekh the otter,
when he goes a-courting and uses Musquash's portage to shorten his
journey.

At the other end of the portage I waited for Simmo to come round the
bend, and took him back to see the work, denouncing the heartless
carelessness of the trapper who had gone away in the spring and left an
unsprung deadfall as a menace to the wild things. At the first glance
he pronounced it an otter trap. Then the fear and wonder swept into his
face, and the questions into mine.

"Das Noel Waby's trap. Nobody else make-um tukpeel stick like dat," he
said at last.

Then I understood. Noel Waby had gone up river trapping in the spring,
and had never come back; nor any word to tell how death met him.

I stooped down to examine the trap with greater interest. On the
underside of the fall-log I found some long hairs still clinging in the
crevices of the rough bark. They belonged to the outer waterproof coat
with which Keeonekh keeps his fur dry. One otter at least had been
caught here, and the trap reset. But some sense of danger, some old
scent of blood or subtle warning clung to the spot, and no other
creature had crossed the bed log, though hundreds must have passed that
way since the old Indian reset his trap, and strode away with the dead
otter across his shoulders.

What was it in the air? What sense of fear brooded here and whispered in
the alder leaves and tinkled in the brook? Simmo grew uneasy and hurried
away. He was like the wood folk. But I sat down on a great log that the
spring floods had driven in through the alders to feel the meaning
of the place, if possible, and to have the vast sweet solitude all to
myself for a little while.

A faint stir on my left, and another! Then up the path, twisting and
gliding,