MUSQUASH THE MUSK-RAT 223 



gongs and &quot;step fast there!&quot; such a life seems the 

 type of utter laziness. But the best-learned lessons are 

 those imbibed unconsciously and the keenest pleasures 

 come unsought. Perhaps when the great profit-and- 

 loss account of the hereafter is cast up, the trapper 

 may be found to have a greater sum total of happi 

 ness, of usefulness, of real knowledge than the multi 

 millionaire whose life was one buzzing round of drive 

 and worry and grind. Usually the busy city man has 

 spent nine or ten of the most precious years of his 

 youth in study 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 car 

 ries on the work of her realm. 



On one of these idle days when the trapper seems 

 to be slouching so lazily over the prarie 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 whin* 

 as if the light green musk-plant were growing some 

 where 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 odour with all the 

 difference between it and dead leaves that there is be 

 tween June roses and the dried dust of a rose jar. The 

 wind falls. He may not catch the faintest odour of 

 swamp growth again, but he knows there must be stag 

 nant 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 



