popular fancy is wont to dress
him he has none. Bright colours would be a danger-signal to game. If his
costume has any colour, it is a waist-belt or neck-scarf, a toque or
bright handkerchief round his head to keep distant hunters from
mistaking him for a moose. For the rest, his clothes are as ragged as
any old, weather-worn garments. Sleeping on balsam boughs or cooking
over a smoky fire will reduce the newness of blanket coat and buckskin
jacket to the dun shades of the grizzled forest. A few days in the open
and the trapper has the complexion of a bronzed tree-trunk.

Like other wild creatures, this foster-child of the forest gradually
takes on the appearance and habits of woodland life. Nature protects the
ermine by turning his russet coat of the grass season to spotless white
for midwinter--except the jet tail-tip left to lure hungry enemies and
thus, perhaps, to prevent the little stoat degenerating into a sloth.
And the forest looks after her foster-child by transforming the smartest
suit that ever stepped out of the clothier's bandbox to the dull tints
of winter woods.

This is the seasoning of the man for the work. But the trapper's
training does not stop here.

When the birds have gone south the silence of a winter forest on a
windless day becomes tense enough to be snapped by either a man's
breathing or the breaking of a small twig; and the trapper acquires a
habit of moving through the brush with noiseless stealth. He must learn
to see better than the caribou can hear or the wolf smell--which means
that in keenness and accuracy his sight outdistances the average
field-glass. Besides, the trapper has learned how to look, how to see,
and seeing--discern; which the average man cannot do even through a
field-glass. Then animals have a trick of deceiving the enemy into
mistaking them for inanimate things by suddenly standing stock-still in
closest peril, unflinching as stone; and to match himself against them
the trapper must also get the knack of instantaneously becoming a
statue, though he feel the clutch of bruin's five-inch claws.

And these things are only the _a b c_ of the trapper's woodcraft.

One of the best hunters in America confessed that the longer he trapped
the more he thought every animal different enough from the fellows of
its kind to be a species by itself. Each day was a fresh page in the
book of forest-lore.

It is in the month of May-goosey-geezee, the Ojibways' trout month,
corres