frost
will hold like a vice till the trapper comes, and, most common of all,
twine snares such as entrap the rabbit, are the means by which the
ermine comes to his appointed end at the hands of men.

The quality of the pelt shows as wide variety as the skin of the fox;
and for as mysterious reasons. Why an ermine a year old should have a
coat like sulphur and another of the same age a coat like swan's-down,
neither trapper nor scientist has yet discovered. The price of the
perfect ermine-pelt is higher than any other of the rare furs taken in
North America except silver fox; but it no longer commands the fabulous
prices that were certainly paid for specimen ermine-skins in the days
of the Georges in England and the later Louis in France. How were those
fabulously costly skins prepared? Old trappers say no perfectly downy
pelt is ever taken from an ermine, that the downy effect is produced by
a trick of the trade--scraping the flesh side so deftly that all the
coarse hairs will fall out, leaving only the soft under-fur.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 45: That is, as far as trappers yet know.]

CHAPTER XIX

WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR

Waging ceaseless war against beaver and moose, types of nature's most
harmless creatures, against wolf and wolverine, types of nature's most
destructive agents, against traders who were rivals and Indians who were
hostiles, the trapper would almost seem to be himself a type of nature's
arch-destroyer.

Beautiful as a dream is the silent world of forest and prairie and
mountain where the trapper moves with noiseless stealth of the most
skilful of all the creatures that prey. In that world, the crack of the
trapper's rifle, the snap of the cruel steel jaws in his trap, seem the
only harsh discords in the harmony of an existence that riots with a
very fulness of life. But such a world is only a dream. The reality is
cruel as death. Of all the creatures that prey, man is the most
merciful.

Ordinarily, knowledge of animal life is drawn from three sources. There
are park specimens, stuffed to the utmost of their eating capacity and
penned off from the possibility of harming anything weaker than
themselves. There are the private pets fed equally well, pampered and
chained safely from harming or being harmed. There are the wild
creatures roaming natural haunts, some two or three days' travel from
civilization, whose natures have been gradually modified generation by
generation from bein