WILD LIFE ABOUT MY CABIN 



such perfume, such purity, such snow of petal and 

 such gold of anther, from the dark water and still 

 darker ooze. How feminine it seems beside its 

 coarser and more robust congeners ; how shy, how 

 pliant, how fine in texture and star-like in form ! 



The loosestrife is a foreign plant, but it has made 

 itself thoroughly at home here, and its masses of 

 royal purple make the woods look civil and festive. 

 The cardinal burns with a more intense fire, and 

 fairly lights up the little dark nooks where it glasses 

 itself in the still water. One must pause and look 

 at it. Its intensity, its pure scarlet, the dark back- 

 ground upon which it is projected, its image in the 

 still darker water, and its general air of retirement 

 and seclusion, all arrest and delight the eye. It is a 

 heart-throb of color on the bosom of the dark soli- 

 tude. 



The rarest and wildest animal that my neighbor- 

 hood boasts of is the otter. Every winter we see the 

 tracks of one or more of them upon the snow along 

 Black Creek. But the eye that has seen the animal 

 itself in recent years I cannot find. It probably 

 makes its excursions along the creek by night. Fol- 

 low its track — as large as that of a fair-sized dog — 

 over the ice, and you will find that it ends at every 

 open pool and rapid, and begins again upon the ice 

 beyond. Sometimes it makes little excursions up the 

 bank, its body often dragging in the snow like a log. 

 My son followed the track one day far up the moun- 



153 



