OTHER LITTLE ANIMALS 289 



growth. From other idle days like these, the trapper has learned 

 that muskrats are not solitary but always to be found in colonies. 

 Now if the muskrat were as wise as the beaver to whom the Indians 

 say he is closely akin, that alarmed marauder would carry the news 

 of the man-intruder to the whole swamp. Perhaps if the others 

 remembered from the prod of a spear or the flash of a gun what 

 man's coming meant, that news would cause terrified flight of 

 every muskrat from 'the marsh. But musquash — little beaver, 

 as the Indians call him — is not so wise, not so timid, not so easily 

 frightened from his home as amisk, 1 the beaver. In fact, nature's 

 provision for the muskrat's protection seems to have emboldened 

 the little rodent almost to the point of stupidity. His skin is of 

 that burnt umber shade hardly to be distinguished from the earth. 

 At one moment his sharp nose cuts the water, at the next he is com- 

 pletely hidden in the soft clay of the under-tangle ; and while you 

 are straining for a sight of him through the pool, he has scurried 

 across a mud bank to his burrow. 



Hunt him as they may, men and boys and ragged squaws 

 wading through swamps knee-high, yet after a century of hunting 

 from the Chesapeake and the Hackensack to the swamps of "sky- 

 colored water" on the far prairie, little musquash still yields 

 7,000,000 pelts a year with never a sign of diminishing. A hun- 

 dred years ago, in 1788, so little was muskrat held in esteem as a 

 fur, the great North-west Company of Canada sent out only 17,000 

 or 20,000 skins a year. So rapidly did muskrat grow in favor as 

 a lining and imitation fur that in 1888 it was no unusual thing for 

 200,000 muskrat-skins to be brought to a single Hudson's Bay 

 Company fort. In Canada the climate compels the use of heavier 

 furs than in the United States, so that the all-fur coat is in greater 



1 Amisk, the Chippewyan, umisk, the Cree, with much the same sound. A well-known 

 trader told the writer that he considered the variation in Indian language more a matter of 

 dialect than difference in meaning, and that while he could speak only Ojibway he never had 

 any difficulty in understanding and being understood by Cree, Chippewyan, and Assiniboine. 

 For instance, rabbit, "the little white chap," is wahboos on the Upper Ottawa, zvapus on the 

 Saskatchewan, wapauce on the MacKenzie. 



