rush-grown marshy ravines where the stagnant waters lap lazily among the
flags, though a feathering of ice begins to rim the quiet pools early in
autumn. Unless he is duck-shooting down there in the hidden slough where
is a great "quack-quack" of young teals, the trapper may not uncase his
gun. For a whole morning he lies idly in the sunlight beside some river
where a roundish black head occasionally bobs up only to dive under when
it sees the man. Or else he sits by the hour still as a statue on the
mossy log of a swamp where a long wriggling--wriggling trail marks the
snaky motion of some creature below the amber depths.

To the city man whose days are regulated by clockwork and electric trams
with the ceaseless iteration of gongs and "step fast there!" such a
life seems the type of utter laziness. But the best-learned lessons are
those imbibed unconsciously and the keenest pleasures come unsought.
Perhaps when the great profit-and-loss account of the hereafter is cast
up, the trapper may be found to have a greater sum total of happiness,
of usefulness, of real knowledge than the multi-millionaire whose life
was one buzzing round of drive and worry and grind. Usually the busy
city man has spent nine or ten of the most precious years of his youth
in study and travel to learn other men's thoughts for his own life's
work. The trapper spends an idle month or two of each year wandering
through a wild world learning the technic of his craft at first hand.
And the trapper's learning is all done leisurely, calmly, without
bluster or drive, just as nature herself carries on the work of her
realm.

On one of these idle days when the trapper seems to be slouching so
lazily over the prarie comes a whiff of dank growth on the crisp autumn
air. Like all wild creatures travelling up-wind, the trapper at once
heads a windward course. It comes again, just a whiff as if the light
green musk-plant were growing somewhere on a dank bank. But ravines are
not dank in the clear fall days; and by October the musk-plant has
wilted dry. This is a fresh living odour with all the difference between
it and dead leaves that there is between June roses and the dried dust
of a rose jar. The wind falls. He may not catch the faintest odour of
swamp growth again, but he knows there must be stagnant water somewhere
in these prairie ravines; and a sense that is part _feel_, part
intuition, part inference from what the wind told of the marsh smell,
leads