l in
another place. Whatever was eaten went to the crows and mink. Keeonekh
disdained it.

Then I set the trap in some water (to kill the smell of it) on a game
path among some swamp alders, at a bend of the river where nobody ever
came and where I had found Keeonekh's tracks. The next night he walked
into it. But the trap that was sure grip for woodchucks was a plaything
for Keeonekh's strength. He wrenched his foot out of it, leaving me only
a few glistening hairs--which was all I ever caught of him.

Years afterward, when I found old Noel's trap on Keeonekh's portage, I
asked Simmo why no bait had been used.

"No good use-um bait," he said, "Keeonekh like-um fresh fish, an'
catch-um self all he want." And that is true. Except in starvation
times, when even the pools are frozen, or the fish die from one of their
mysterious epidemics, Keeonekh turns up his nose at any bait. If a bit
of castor is put in a split stick, he will turn aside, like all the
fur-bearers, to see what this strange smell is. But if you would toll
him with a bait, you must fasten a fish in the water in such a way that
it seems alive as the current wiggles it, else Keeonekh will never think
it worthy of his catching.

The den in the river bank was never disturbed, and the following year
another litter was raised there. With characteristic cunning--a cunning
which grows keener and keener in the neighborhood of civilization--the
mother-otter filled up the land entrance among the roots with earth and
driftweed, using only the doorway under water until it was time for the
cubs to come out into the world again.

Of all the creatures of the wilderness Keeonekh is the most richly
gifted, and his ways, could we but search them out, would furnish a most
interesting chapter. Every journey he takes, whether by land or water,
is full of unknown traits and tricks; but unfortunately no one ever sees
him doing things, and most of his ways are yet to be found out. You see
a head holding swiftly across a wilderness lake, or coming to meet your
canoe on the streams; then, as you follow eagerly, a swirl and he is
gone. When he comes up again he will watch you so much more keenly than
you can possibly watch him that you learn little about him, except how
shy he is. Even the trappers who make a business of catching him, and
with whom I have often talked, know almost nothing of Keeonekh, except
where to set their traps for him living and how to care for his skin
wh