THE OTHER GREAT STAPLE FURS 139 



haul up his rifle, or motion his dog, the cougar leaped, not at the 

 fawn, but in flight back to the woods, where, the family afterwards 

 wrote to me, they heard his screaming for a night or two. He may 

 be ignored as a fur bearer, though he is so classified. Forest rangers 

 in the Rockies still get the cougar in the Upper Mountains and they 

 classify them always as "varmints." 



Domestic Cat 



If your sympathies have ever gone out to the stray gutter cats 

 left by city people every year to fend for themselves when the hegira 

 takes place to the country and to summer resorts — rejoice ! There 

 are no more stray cats. The craze for summer furs and cheap furs 

 has exterminated the gutter cat. It has also exterminated many 

 a beautiful domestic tommy, who mysteriously disappears to the 

 sheer joy and multitudinous increase of feathered songsters. I have 

 an old acquaintance in New York, whose little shop I have patron- 

 ized for years, drawn in the first place by the beautiful tortoise shell 

 and black cats, which always sat sedately on his counter and came 

 to me instinctively for petting. For the last year or two, I have 

 missed his cats. He can keep only one, where he used to keep three. 



"Where are your beautiful cats ?" I asked. 



"Yes," he answered. "You may well ask that." Then he 

 swore in Spanish. "I can't keep one. I suspect if you look hard 

 enough, you will find them round the necks of some of your friends 

 dyed for fox." 



And it is true. 



The domestic cat is now a factor in the fur trade. More than 

 three millions are used annually ; and from my lawn this year, I 

 hear more feathered songsters than I have known for ten years, 

 singing a glad requiem to the cats. Blacks and browns are the 

 favorites of the trade ; and for the best Dutch cats, prices used to 

 run 3 d to 8 shillings. Silver grays are rare. All are dyed for 

 imitation furs and in the spring sales of 1920, prices ran from #1.15 

 to 55^ and 150 according to grade. 



