nor less than an overgrown tomcat, except for a decorative tuft at his
ears, and like all his brethren soft as flower petals in his step; but
because he mews unpleasantly on the trail he has a worse reputation than
he deserves. But not so with the wolverine. Many unkind remarks have
been addressed to him, but no words have ever been invented--even the
marvelous combinations of expletives known to the trapper--properly to
describe him. The little people of the forest--the birds in the
shrubbery and the squirrels in the trees and the little digging rodents
in the ground--fear him and hate him for his stealth and his cunning.
Even the cow caribou, remembering his way of leaping suddenly from
ambush upon her calf, dreads him for his ferocity and his strength; and
the trapper, finding his bait stolen from every trap on his line, calls
down curses upon his head. But for all this unpopularity he continues
to prosper and increase.

Virginia saw where a marten and a squirrel had come to death grips in
the snow: the tracks and an ominous red stain told the story plainly.
The squirrel had attempted to seek safety in flight, but the marten was
even swifter in the tree limbs than the squirrel himself. The little
animal had made a flying leap to the ground,--a small part of a second
too late. The marten, Bill explained, were no longer numerous. Fur
buyers all over the world were paying many times their weight in gold
for the glossy skins.

"Marten can catch squirrel, but fisher can catch marten," is an old
saying among the trappers; and as they rode Bill told her some of his
adventures with these latter, beautiful fur bearers. The fisher, it
seemed, hunted every kind of living creature that he could master except
fish. When the names of the animals were passed around, Bill said, the
otter and the fisher got their slips mixed, and the misnomer had
followed them through the centuries. He showed her the tracks of the
ermine and, now that they were reaching the high altitudes, the trail of
the ptarmigan in the snow. Mink, fox, and coyote had hunted each other
gayly through the drifts, and all three had hunted the snowshoe rabbit
and field mouse; a half-blind gopher had emerged from his den to view
the morning and had ducked quickly back at the sight of the snow; an owl
had snatched a Canada jay from her perch and had left a few clotted
feathers when the daylight had driven him from his feast.

The rigors of the day's travel