MUSQUASH THE MUSK-RAT 229 



reeds and grass and mosses cemented together with 

 soft clay? The roof has been torn from the domed 

 house, leaving the inside bare and showing plainly the 

 domestic economy of the musk-rat home, smooth round 

 walls inside, a floor or gallery of sticks and grasses, 

 where the family had lived in an air chamber above 

 the water, rough walls below the water-line and two 

 or three little openings that must have been safely un 

 der water before the swamp receded. Perhaps a mus 

 sel or lily bulb has been left in the deserted larder. 

 From the oozy slime below the mid-floor to the top 

 most wall will not measure more than two or three 

 feet. If the swamp had not dried here, the stupid lit 

 tle musk-rats that escaped the ravager s claws would 

 probably have come back to the wrecked house, built 

 up the torn roof, and gone on living in danger till 

 another wolverine came. But a water doorway the 

 musk-rat must have. That he has learned by countless 

 assaults on his house-top, so when the marsh retreated 

 the musk-rats abandoned their house. 



All about the deserted house are runways, tiny 

 channels across oozy peninsulas and islands of the 

 musk-rat s diminutive world such as a very small beaver 

 might make. The trapper jumps across to a dry 

 patch or mound in the midst of the slimy bottom and 

 prods an earth bank with a stick. It is as he thought 

 hollow ; a musk-rat burrow or gallery in the clay wall 

 where the refugees from this house had scuttled from 

 the wolverine. But now all is deserted. The water 

 has shrunk that was the danger signal to the musk- 

 rat; and there had been a grand moving to a deeper 

 part of the swamp. Perhaps, after all, this is a very 

 old house not used since last winter. 



