OTHER LITTLE ANIMALS 287 



and travel to learn other men's thoughts for his own life's work. 

 The trapper spends an idle month or two of each year wandering 

 through a wild world learning the technic of his craft at first hand. 

 And the trapper's learning is all done leisurely, calmly, without 

 bluster or drive, just as nature herself carries on the work of her 

 realm. 



On one of these idle days when the trapper seems to be slouching 

 so lazily over the prairie comes a whiff of dank growth on the crisp 

 autumn air. Like all wild creatures travelling up-wind, the trapper 

 at once heads a windward course. It comes again, just a whiff as 

 if the light green musk-plant were growing somewhere on a dank 

 bank. But ravines are not dank in the clear fall days ; and by 

 October the musk-plant has wilted dry. This is a fresh living 

 odor with all the difference between it and dead leaves that there 

 is between June roses and the dried dust of a rose jar. The wind 

 falls. He may not catch the faintest odor of swamp growth 

 again, but he knows there must be stagnant water somewhere in 

 these prairie ravines ; and a sense that is part feel, part intuition, 

 part inference from what the wind told of the marsh smell, leads his 

 footsteps down the browned hillside to the soggy bottom of a slough. 



A covey of teals — very young, or they would not be so bold 

 — flackers up, wings about with a clatter, then settles again a 

 space farther ahead when the ducks see that the intruder remains so 

 still. The man parts the flags, sits down on a log motionless as 

 the log itself — and watches ! Something else had taken alarm 

 from the crunch of the hunter's moccasins through the dry reeds ; 

 for a slimy trail is there, showing where a creature has dived below 

 and is running among the wet under-tangle. Not far off on another 

 log deep in the shade of the highest flags solemnly perches a small 

 prairie-owl. It is almost the russet shade of the dead log. It 

 hunches up and blinks stupidly at all this noise in the swamp. 



"Oho," thinks the trapper, "so I've disturbed a still hunt," 

 and he sits if anything stiller than ever, only stooping to lay his 

 gun down and pick up a stone. 



