from above. Little death-dealer he has been all his
life; and now death comes to him for a nobler cause than the stuffing of
a greedy maw--for the clothing of a creature nobler than himself--man.

The otter can protect himself by diving, even diving under snow. The
mink has craft to hide himself under leaves so that the sharpest eyes
cannot detect him. Both mink and otter furs have very little of that
animal smell which enables the foragers to follow their trail. What gift
has wapistan, the marten, to protect himself against all the powers that
prey? His strength and his wisdom lie in the little stubby feet. These
can climb.

A trapper's dog had stumbled on a marten in a stump hole. A snap of the
marten's teeth sent the dog back with a jump. Wapistan will hang on to
the nose of a dog to the death; and trappers' dogs grow cautious. Before
the dog gathered courage to make another rush, the marten escaped by a
rear knot-hole, getting the start of his enemy by fifty yards. Off they
raced, the dog spending himself in fury, the marten keeping under the
thorny brush where his enemy could not follow, then across open snow
where the dog gained, then into the pine woods where the trail ended on
the snow. Where had the fugitive gone? When the man came up, he first
searched for log holes. There were none. Then he lifted some of the
rocks. There was no trace of wapistan. But the dog kept baying a special
tree, a blasted trunk, bare as a mast pole and seemingly impossible for
any animal but a squirrel to climb. Knowing the trick by which creatures
like the bob-cat can flatten their body into a resemblance of a tree
trunk, the trapper searched carefully all round the bare trunk. It was
not till many months afterward when a wind storm had broken the tree
that he discovered the upper part had been hollow. Into this eerie nook
the pursued marten had scrambled and waited in safety till dog and man
retired.

In one of his traps the man finds a peculiarly short specimen of the
marten. In the vernacular of the craft this marten's bushy tail will not
reach as far back as his hind legs can stretch. Widely different from
the mink's scarcely visible ears, this fellow's ears are sharply
upright, keenly alert. He is like a fox, where the mink resembles a
furred serpent. Marten moves, springs, jumps like an animal. Mink glides
like a snake. Marten has the strong neck of an animal fighter. Mink has
the long, thin, twisting neck which reptiles nee