tles, and fish of every kind. But few have
ever seen him at his hunting, for he is active only at night or on
dark days.

I used to watch them from the shore or from my canoe at twilight. Just
outside the lily pads a shoal of minnows would be playing at the
surface, or small trout would be rising freely for the night insects.
Then, if you watched sharply, you would see gleaming points of light,
the eyes of Chigwooltz, stealing out, with barely a ripple, to the
edge of the pads. And then, when some big feeding trout drove the
minnows or small fry close in, there would be a heavy plunge from the
shadow of the pads; and you would hear Chigwooltz splashing if the
fish were a larger one than he expected.

That is why small frogs are so deadly afraid if you take them outside
the fringe of lily pads. They know that big hungry trout feed in from
the deeps, and that big frogs, savage cannibals every one, watch out
from the shadowy fringe of water plants. If you drop a little frog
there, in clear water, he will shoot in as fast as his frightened legs
will drive him, swimming first on top to avoid fish, diving deep as he
reaches the pads to avoid his hungry relatives; and so in to shallow
water and thick stems, where he can dodge about and the big frogs
cannot follow.

All sorts and conditions of frogs lived in that little bay. There was
one inquisitive fellow, who always came out of the pads and swam as
near as he could get whenever I appeared on the shore. Another would
sit in his favorite spot, under a stranded log, and let me come as
close as I would; but the moment I dangled the red ibis fly in front
of him, he would disappear like a wink, and not show himself again.
Another would follow the fly in a wild kangaroo dance over the lily
pads, going round and round the canoe as if bewitched, and would do
his best to climb in after the bit of color when I pulled it up slowly
over the bark. He afforded me so much good fun that I could not eat
him; though I always stopped to give him another dance, whenever I
went fishing for other frogs just like him. Further along shore lived
another, a perfect savage, so wild that I could never catch him, which
strangled or drowned two big frogs in a week, to my certain knowledge.
And then, one night when I was trying to find my canoe which I had
lost in the darkness, I came upon a frog migration, dozens and dozens
of them, all hopping briskly in the same direction. They had left the
stream,