CHAPTER XI 

 WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR 



Waging ceaseless war against beaver and moose, types of na- 

 ture's most harmless creatures, against wolf and wolverine, types of 

 nature's most destructive agents, against traders who were rivals 

 and Indians who were hostiles, the trapper would almost seem to be 

 himself a type of nature's arch-destroyer. 



Beautiful as a dream is the silent world of forest and prairie and 

 mountain where the trapper moves with noiseless stealth of the 

 most skilful of all the creatures that prey. In that world, the 

 crack of the trapper's rifle, the snap of the cruel steel jaws in his 

 trap, seem the only harsh discords in the harmony of an existence 

 that riots with a very fulness of life. But such a world is only a 

 dream. The reality is cruel as death. Of all the creatures that 

 prey, man is the most merciful. 



Ordinarily, knowledge of animal life is drawn from three sources. 

 There are park specimens, stuffed to the utmost of their eating 

 capacity and penned off from the possibility of harming anything 

 weaker than themselves. There are the private pets fed equally 

 well, pampered and chained safely from harming or being harmed. 

 There are the wild creatures roaming natural haunts, some two or 

 three days' travel from civilization, whose natures have been 

 gradually modified generation by generation from being constantly 

 hunted with long-range repeaters. Judging from these sorts of 

 wild animals, it certainly seems that the brute creation has been 

 sadly maligned. The bear cubs lick each other's paws with an 

 amatory singing that is something between the purr of a cat and the 

 grunt of a pig. The old polars wrestle like boys out of school, 



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