rat-shaped head follows this
twitching proboscis. Then a brownish earth-coloured body swims with a
wriggling sidelong movement for the log, where roosts the blinking
owlet. A little noiseless leap! and a dripping musk-rat with long flat
tail and webbed feet scrabbles up the moss-covered tree towards the
stupid bird. Another moment, and the owl would have toppled into the
water with a pair of sharp teeth clutched to its throat. Then the man
shies a well-aimed stone!

Splash! Flop! The owl is flapping blindly through the flags to another
hiding-place, while the wriggle-wriggle of the waters tells where the
marsh-rat has darted away under the tangled growth. From other idle days
like these, the trapper has learned that musk-rats are not solitary but
always to be found in colonies. Now if the musk-rat were as wise as the
beaver to whom the Indians say he is closely akin, that alarmed
marauder would carry the news of the man-intruder to the whole swamp.
Perhaps if the others remembered from the prod of a spear or the flash
of a gun what man's coming meant, that news would cause terrified flight
of every musk-rat from the marsh. But musquash--little beaver, as the
Indians call him--is not so wise, not so timid, not so easily frightened
from his home as _amisk_,[44] the beaver. In fact, nature's provision
for the musk-rat's protection seems to have emboldened the little rodent
almost to the point of stupidity. His skin is of that burnt umber shade
hardly to be distinguished from the earth. At one moment his sharp nose
cuts the water, at the next he is completely hidden in the soft clay of
the under-tangle; and while you are straining for a sight of him
through the pool, he has scurried across a mud bank to his burrow.

Hunt him as they may, men and boys and ragged squaws wading through
swamps knee-high, yet after a century of hunting from the Chesapeake and
the Hackensack to the swamps of "sky-coloured water" on the far prairie,
little musquash still yields 6,000,000 pelts a year with never a sign of
diminishing. A hundred years ago, in 1788, so little was musk-rat held
in esteem as a fur, the great North-West Company of Canada sent out
only 17,000 or 20,000 skins a year. So rapidly did musk-rat grow in
favour as a lining and imitation fur that in 1888 it was no unusual
thing for 200,000 musk-rat-skins to be brought to a single Hudson's Bay
Company fort. In Canada the climate compels the use of heavier furs than
in the Unite