The slow worm fills the hungry maw of the gaping bird. Into the soft fur
of the rabbit that has strayed too far from cover clutch the swooping
talons of an eagle. The beaver that exposes himself overland risks
bringing lynx or wolverine or wolf on his home colony. Bird preys on
worm, mink on bird, lynx on mink, wolf on lynx, and bear on all
creatures that live from men and moose down to the ant and the embryo
life in the ant's egg. But the vision of ravening destruction does not
lead the trapper to morbid conclusions on life as it leads so many
housed thinkers in the walled cities; for the same world that reveals to
him such ravening slaughter shows him that every creature, the weakest
and the strongest, has some faculty, some instinct, some endowment of
cunning, or dexterity or caution, some gift of concealment, of flight,
of semblance, of death--that will defend it from all enemies. The
ermine is one of the smallest of all hunters, but it can throw an enemy
off the scent by diving under snow. The rabbit is one of the most
helpless of all hunted things, but it can take cover from foes of the
air under thorny brush, and run fast enough to outwind the breath of a
pursuer, and double back quick enough to send a harrying eagle flopping
head over heels on the ground, and simulate the stillness of inanimate
objects surrounding it so truly that the passer-by can scarcely
distinguish the balls of fawn fur from the russet bark of a log. And the
rabbit's big eyes and ears are not given it for nothing.

Poet and trapper alike see the same world, and for the same reason. Both
seek only to know the truth, to see the world as it is; and the world
that they see is red in tooth and claw. But neither grows morbid from
his vision; for that same vision shows each that the ravening
destruction is only a weeding out of the unfit. There is too much
sunlight in the trapper's world, too much fresh air in his lungs, too
much red blood in his veins for the morbid miasmas that bring bilious
fumes across the mental vision of the housed city man.

And what place in the scale of destruction does the trapper occupy?
Modern sentiment has almost painted him as a red-dyed monster,
excusable, perhaps, because necessity compels the hunter to slay, but
after all only the most highly developed of the creatures that prey. Is
this true? Arch-destroyer he may be; but it should be remembered that he
is the destroyer of destroyers.

Animals kill young and