WHAT THE TRAPPER STANDS FOR 329 



The slow worm fills the hungry maw of the gaping bird. Into 

 the soft fur of the rabbit that has strayed too far from cover clutch 

 the swooping talons of an eagle. The beaver that exposes himself 

 overland risks bringing lynx or wolverine or wolf on his home 

 colony. Bird preys on worm, mink on bird, lynx on mink, wolf 

 on lynx, and bear on all creatures that live from men and moose 

 down to the ant and the embryo life in the ant's egg. But the 

 vision of ravening destruction does not lead the trapper to morbid 

 conclusions on life as it leads so many housed thinkers in the walled 

 cities ; for the same world that reveals to him such ravening 

 slaughter shows him that every creature, the weakest and the 

 strongest, has some faculty, some instinct, some endowment of 

 cunning, or dexterity or caution, some gift of concealment, of flight, 

 of semblance, of death — that will defend it from all enemies. 

 The ermine is one of the smallest of all hunters, but it can throw 

 an enemy off* the scent by diving under snow. The rabbit is one 

 of the most helpless of all hunted things, but it can take cover from 

 foes of the air under thorny brush, and run fast enough to outwind 

 the breath of a pursuer, and double back quick enough to send a 

 harrying eagle flopping head over heels on the ground, and simulate 

 the stillness of inanimate objects surrounding it so truly that the 

 passer-by can scarcely distinguish the balls of fawn fur from the 

 russet bark of a log. And the rabbit's big eyes and ears are not 

 given it for nothing. 



Poet and trapper alike see the same world, and for the same 

 reason. Both seek only to know the truth, to see the world as it 

 is ; and the world that they see is red in tooth and claw. But 

 neither grows morbid from his vision ; for that same vision shows 

 each that the ravening destruction is only a weeding out of the 

 unfit. There is too much sunlight in the trapper's world, too 

 much fresh air in his lungs, too much red blood in his veins for the 

 morbid miasmas that bring bilious fume across the mental vision 

 of the housed city man. 



And what place in the scale of destruction does the trapper 



