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I had recognized the bones at once as the skeleton 

 of a muskrat. It was something peculiar in the way 

 they lay that had caused me to pause. They seemed 

 outstretched, as if composed by gentle hands, the hands 

 of Sleep. They had not been flung down. The deli- 

 cate ribs had fallen in, but not a bone was broken 

 or displaced, not one showed the splinter of shot, or 

 the crack that might have been made by a steel trap. 

 No violence had been done them. They had been 

 touched by nothing rougher than the snow. Out 

 into the hidden runway they had crept. Death had 

 passed them here; but no one else in all the winter 

 months. 



The creature had died — a "natural" death. It had 

 starved, while a hundred acres of plenty lay round 

 about. Picking up the skull, I found the jaws locked 

 together as if they were a single solid bone. One of 

 the two incisor teeth of the upper jaw was missing, 

 and apparently had never developed. The opposite 

 tooth on the lower jaw, thus unopposed and so un- 

 worn, had grown beyond its normal height up into the 

 empty socket above, then on, turning outward and 

 piercing the cheek-bone in front of the eye, whence, 

 curving like a boar's tusk, it had slowly closed the 



90 



I 



