bear, after eating a
minnow that my paddle had routed out for him) shooting frogs for my
table with a pocket rifle. How different it was here, I reflected, from
the woods about home. There the game was already harried; the report of
a gun set every living creature skulking. Here the crack of my little
rifle was no more heeded than the plunge of a fish-hawk, or the groaning
of a burdened elm bough. A score of fat woodcock lay unheeding in that
bit of alder tangle yonder, the ground bored like a colander after their
night's feeding. Up on the burned hillside the partridges said, quit,
quit! when I appeared, and jumped to a tree and craned their necks
to see what I was. The black ducks skulked in the reeds. They were
full-grown now and strong of wing, but the early hiding habit was not
yet broken up by shooting. They would glide through the sedges, and
double the bogs, and crouch in a tangle till the canoe was almost upon
them, when with a rush and a frightened hark-ark! they shot into the air
and away to the river. The mink, changing from brown to black, gave up
his nest-robbing for honest hunting, undismayed by trap or deadfall;
and up in the inlet I could see grassy domes rising above the bronze and
gold of the marsh, where Musquash was building thick and high for winter
cold and spring floods. Truly it was good to be here, and to enter for a
brief hour into the shy, wild but unharried life of the wood folk.

A big bullfrog showed his head among the lily pads, and the little
rifle, unmindful of the joys of an unharried existence, rose slowly to
its place. My eye was glancing along the sights when a sudden movement
in the alders on the shore, above and beyond the unconscious head of
Chigwooltz the frog, spared him for a little season to his lily pads and
his minnow hunting. At the same moment a kingfisher went rattling by
to his old perch over the minnow pool. The alders swayed again as
if struck; a huge bear lumbered out of them to the shore, with a
disgruntled woof! at some twig that had switched his ear too sharply.

I slid lower in the canoe till only my head and shoulders were visible.
Mooween went nosing along-shore till something--a dead fish or a mussel
bed--touched his appetite, when he stopped and began feeding, scarcely
two hundred yards away. I reached first for my heavy rifle, then for
the paddle, and cautiously "fanned" the canoe towards shore till an
old stump on the point covered my approach. Then the lit