226 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 



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 musk-rat from the marsh. But 

 musquash little heaver, as the Indians call him is 

 not so wise, not so timid, not so easily frightened from, 

 his home as amislc* the beaver. In fact, nature s pro 

 vision for the musk-rat s protection seems to have em 

 boldened 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 completely 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 &quot; sky-coloured water &quot; on 

 the far prairie, little musquash still yields 6,000,000 

 pelts a year with never a sign of diminishing. A. hun 

 dred years ago, in 1788, so little was musk-rat held in 

 esteem as a fur, the great North-West Company of 



* Amisk, the Chippewyan, umisk, the Cree, with much the 

 same sound. A well-known trader told the writer that he con 

 sidered 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, &quot;the little white chap,&quot; is wahboos on the Upper Ottawa, 

 wapus on the Saskatchewan, wapauce on the MacKenzie. 



