WATER POACHERS 191 



birds of prey with the grouse disease. A falcon 

 always takes the easiest chance at its prey; and an 

 otter captures the slowest fish. In each case they 

 kill off the weakest, the most diseased, and thereby 

 secure the survival of the fittest. Most of the news- 

 paper paragraphs anent the doings of otters are 

 mere legendary stories without any foundation in 

 fact. The otter is not a " fish-slicer." Salmon 

 found upon the rocks with the flesh bitten from the 

 shoulders are oftener than not there by agents other 

 than Lutm. A great deal of unnatural history has 

 been written concerning the " water-dog," mostly 

 by those who have never had opportunity of 

 studying the otter in its haunts. That it occasion- 

 ally destroys fish I will not deny; but this liking 

 has become such a stereotyped fact (?) in natural 

 history that it is glibly repeated, parrot-like, and 

 has continued so long that most have come to 

 accept it. Ask the otter-hunter, the old angler of 

 the rocky northern streams, the field naturalist who 

 has many a night stretched his length along a slab 

 of rock to observe the otter at home and each has 

 the same answer. Abundance of otters and plenty 

 of trout exist side by side ; and where the fastnesses 

 of the former are impregnable, there disease is foreign 

 to the stream. Many otters, many trout; this is a 

 bit of Nature's economy there is no gainsaying. 

 Here is an actual incident. There is a certain 



