is no
danger; so the trapper overlays the back with heavy brush.

Pekan do not yield a rare fur; but they are always at run where the
trapper is hunting the rare furs, and for that reason are usually snared
at the same time as mink and otter.

IV

_Wapistan the Marten_

When Koot went blind on his way home from the rabbit-hunt, he had
intended to set out for the pine woods. Though blizzards still howl over
the prairie, by March the warm sun of midday has set the sap of the
forests stirring and all the woodland life awakens from its long winter
sleep. Cougar and lynx and bear rove through the forest ravenous with
spring hunger. Otter, too, may be found where the ice mounds of a
waterfall are beginning to thaw. But it is not any of these that the
trapper seeks. If they cross his path, good--they, too, will swell his
account at the fur post. It is another of the little chaps that he
seeks, a little, long, low-set animal whose fur is now glistening bright
on the deep dark overhairs, soft as down in the thick fawn underhairs,
wapistan the marten.

When the forest begins to stir with the coming of spring, wapistan stirs
too, crawling out from the hollow of some rotten pine log, restless with
the same blood-thirst that set the little mink playing his tricks on
the hawk. And yet the marten is not such a little viper as the mink.
Wapistan will eat leaves and nuts and roots if he can get vegetable
food, but failing these, that ravenous spring hunger of his must be
appeased with something else. And out he goes from his log hole
hunger-bold as the biggest of all other spring ravagers. That boldness
gives the trapper his chance at the very time when wapistan's fur is
best. All winter the trapper may have taken marten; but the end of
winter is the time when wapistan wanders freely from cover. Thus the
trapper's calendar would have months of musk-rat first, then beaver and
mink and pekan and bear and fox and ermine and rabbit and lynx and
marten, with a long idle midsummer space when he goes to the fort for
the year's provisions and gathers the lore of his craft.

Wapistan is not hard to track. Being much longer and heavier than a cat
with very short legs and small feet, his body almost drags the ground
and his tracks sink deep, clear, and sharp. His feet are smaller than
otter's and mink's, but easily distinguishable from those two fishers.
The water animal leaves a spreading footprint, the mark of the webbed
toes without