en he is dead. Once I saw him fishing in a curious way. It was winter,
on a wilderness stream flowing into the Dugarvon. There had been a fall
of dry snow that still lay deep and powdery over all the woods, too
light to settle or crust. At every step one had to lift a shovelful of
the stuff on the point of his snowshoe; and I was tired out, following
some caribou that wandered like plover in the rain.

Just below me was a deep open pool surrounded by double fringes of ice.
Early in the winter, while the stream was higher, the white ice had
formed thickly on the river wherever the current was not too swift for
freezing. Then the stream fell, and a shelf of new black ice formed at
the water's level, eighteen inches or more below the first ice, some of
which still clung to the banks, reaching out in places two or three feet
and forming dark caverns with the ice below. Both shelves dipped towards
the water, forming a gentle incline all about the edges of the open
places.

A string of silver bubbles shooting across the black pool at my feet
roused me out of a drowsy weariness. There it was again, a rippling wave
across the pool, which rose to the surface a moment later in a hundred
bubbles, tinkling like tiny bells as they broke in the keen air. Two or
three times I saw it with growing wonder. Then something stirred under
the shelf of ice across the pool. An otter slid into the water; the
rippling wave shot across again; the bubbles broke at the surface; and
I knew that he was sitting under the white ice below me, not twenty feet
away.

A whole family of otters, three or four of them, were fishing there at
my feet in utter unconsciousness. The discovery took my breath away.
Every little while the bubbles would shoot across from my side, and
watching sharply I would see Keeonekh slide out upon the lower shelf of
ice on the other side and crouch there in the gloom, with back humped
against the ice above him, eating his catch. The fish they caught were
all small evidently, for after a few minutes he would throw himself flat
on the ice, slide down the incline into the water, making no splash or
disturbance as he entered, and the string of bubbles would shoot across
to my side again.

For a full hour I watched them breathlessly, marveling at their skill. A
small fish is nimble game to follow and catch in his own element. But at
every slide Keeonekh did it. Sometimes the rippling wave would shoot all
over the pool, and the bub