3 o8 THE FUR TRADE OF AMERICA 



a steel-trap with fishes and buries it in the snow just where the 

 otter will be coming down the hill or up from the pool. Perhaps 

 he places a dozen such traps around the hole with nothing visible 

 but the frozen fish lying on the surface. If he sets his traps during a 

 snow-fall, so much the better. His own tracks will be obliterated 

 and the otter's nose will discover the fish. Then he takes a bag 

 filled with some substance of animal odor, pomatum, fresh meat, 

 pork, or he may use the flesh side of a fresh deer-hide. This he 

 drags over the snow where he has stepped. He may even use a 

 fresh hide to handle the traps, as a waiter uses a serviette to pass 

 plates. There must be no man-smell, no man-track near the otter 

 traps. 



While the mink-hunt is fairly over by midwinter, otter-trapping 

 lasts from October to May. The value of all rare furs, mink, 

 otter, marten, ermine, varies with two things: (i) the latitude 

 of the hunting-field ; (2) the season of the hunt. For instance, 

 ask a trapper of Minnesota or Lake Superior what he thinks of the 

 ermine, and he will tell you that it is a miserable sort of weasel of a 

 dirty brown not worth twenty-five cents a skin. Ask a trapper of 

 the North Saskatchewan what he thinks of ermine ; and he will tell 

 you it is a pretty little whitish creature good for fur if trapped late 

 enough in the winter and always useful as a lining. But ask a 

 trapper of the Arctic about the ermine, and the describes it as the 

 finest fur that is taken except the silver fox, white and soft as swan's- 

 down, with a tail-tip like black onyx. This difference in the fur 

 of the animal explains the wide variety of prices paid. Ermine 

 not worth twenty-five cents in Wisconsin might be worth ten times 

 as much on the Saskatchewan. 



So it is with the otter. All trapped between latitude thirty- 

 five and sixty is good fur; and the best is that taken toward the 

 end of winter when scarcely a russet hair should be found in the 

 long over-fur of nekik's coat. 



