. Again
he might have spared himself the trouble. His next visit shows the
deadfall torn from behind and robbed without danger to the thief.

Several signs tell the trapper that the marauder is the carcajou or
wolverine. All the stealing was done at night; and the wolverine is
nocturnal. All the traps had been approached from behind. The wolverine
will not cross man's track. The poison in the meat had been scented.
Whether the wolverine knows poison, he is too wary to experiment on
doubtful diet. The exposing of the traps tells of the curiosity which
characterizes the wolverine. Other creatures would have had too much
fear. The tracks run back to cover, and not across country like the
badger's or the fox's.

Fearless, curious, gluttonous, wary, and suspicious, the mischief-maker
and the freebooter and the criminal of the animal world, a scavenger to
save the northland from pollution of carrion, and a scourge to destroy
wounded, weaklings, and laggards--the wolverine has the nose of a fox,
with long, uneven, tusk-like teeth that seem to be expressly made for
tearing. The eyes are well set back, greenish, alert with almost human
intelligence of the type that preys. Out of the fulness of his wrath one
trapper gave a perfect description of the wolverine. He didn't object,
he said, to being outrun by a wolf, or beaten by a respectable Indian,
but to be outwitted by a little beast the size of a pig with the snout
of a fox, the claws of a bear, and the fur of a porcupine's quills, was
more than he could stand.

In the economy of nature the wolverine seems to have but one
design--destruction. Beaver-dams two feet thick and frozen like rock
yield to the ripping onslaught of its claws. He robs everything: the
musk-rats' haycock houses; the gopher burrows; the cached elk and
buffalo calves under hiding of some shrub while the mothers go off to
the watering-place; the traps of his greatest foe, man; the cached
provisions of the forest ranger; the graves of the dead; the very tepees
and lodges and houses of Indian, half-breed, and white man. While the
wolverine is averse to crossing man's track, he will follow it for days,
like a shark behind a ship; for he knows as well as the man knows there
will be food in the traps when the man is in his lodge, and food in the
lodge when the man is at the traps.

But the wolverine has two characteristics by which he may be
snared--gluttony and curiosity.

After the deer has disappeared the