CHAPTER XXXIV. GROUND 

 VERMIN. 



THE OTTER. 



WHAT the stoat and polecat are on land the otter is 

 in water, and as the former are detrimental to the 

 preserver of game, so is the otter to the owners of 

 streams which are strictly preserved for trout and salmon. 

 Although an animal of but medium size, the otter has 

 obtained a greater notoriety as a destroyer of fish than, 

 perhaps, any of the more generally accepted "vermin" 

 have as regards game and rabbits, and were it not that 

 it is becoming daily less numerous, and, as a natural 

 consequence, more wary not to mention its reservation 

 for death at the hands of the otter-hounds and the sport 

 obtained thereby its extinction would be more rapid than 

 it is. 



Possessed of an exceedingly fastidious taste, and well 

 able to discriminate by the appearance of the fish the 

 excellence or otherwise of their condition, the otter invariably 

 selects for capture those in one stretch of river on 

 which the owner may have "had his eye" for some time 



