to
rise, nor indeed did they seem to be at all uneasy at the proximity of
their natural enemy. It was exceedingly interesting, not to say amusing,
to watch the many stratagems of the fox to get at them. Sometimes he
would lie down upon the snow and lash about him with his bushy tail,
whimpering in a querulous and imbecile manner at being thus outwitted by
simple water-fowl. Then a new idea would take possession of him, and he
would start up and run round and round the pool at a tremendous pace,
probably to try and get a chance at the ducks by flurrying them; but
they knew too much for Master Reynard, and always edged away from him
just at the right moment. Tired at last of watching these manoeuvres,
I "drew a bead" upon the fox; but my hands were numbed from keeping
still so long, so that, instead of hitting him in a vital spot, as I had
intended, I only broke one of his forelegs, and away he went into the
woods on three paws with amazing speed, while the ducks rose into the
air at the report of the rifle, and flew up the course of the river in
search of lonelier water. I followed the track of the fox for a mile or
more, but had to give up the chase at last. The snow was flecked with
spots of blood where he ran; and although the fox is not usually an
object of sympathy around Canadian borders, yet I regretted much that I
had not missed this one altogether, instead of maiming him, after all
the amusement he had just afforded me by his curious pranks. This little
incident of fox and ducks might offer a good subject for the pencil of
an animal painter, and I hereby present it either to Mr. W. H. Beard or
to Mr. Hays,--whichever of them may first happen to glance over these
pages.

In some of the districts where game is yet plentiful, and where the
maskinonge--prince of the pike tribe--reigns supreme in the woodland
lakes, and the speckled trout haunts the eddies of the clear streams,
men who cannot be called settlers, in the proper sense of the word, are
often to be met with. They have been attracted thither by the free, wild
romance of the forester's life, the Bohemianism of which is a kind by
itself, although based, like other phases of that philosophy, upon
impatience of the formalities by which society is cramped. On one of
these lakes, in a picturesque and not very remote part of Upper Canada,
there was generally a little knot of such men to be found,--men who had
forsworn the gay world, and come from beyond the sea