THE MUSKRAT 



call echoes along the changed shores, 

 his wake seams with silver the dark gar- 

 ment of the water, and his comically 

 grim visage confronts you now as it did 

 the Waubanakee bowmen in the old days 

 when the otter and the beaver were his 

 familiars. 



Unlike the beaver's slowly maturing 

 crops, his food supply is constantly pro- 

 vided in the annual growth of the 

 marshes. Here in banks contiguous 

 to endless store of succulent sedge and 

 lily roots and shell-cased tidbits of mus- 

 sels, he tunnels his stable water-portaled 

 home, and out there, by the channel's 

 edge, builds his sedge-thatched hut be- 

 fore the earliest frost falls upon the 

 marshes. In its height, some find proph- 

 ecy of high or low water, and in the 

 thickness of its walls the forecast of a 

 mild or severe winter, but the prophet 

 himself is sometimes flooded out of his 

 house, sometimes starved and frozen 

 in it. 



In the still, sunny days between the 

 nights of its unseen building, the blue 

 spikes of the pickerel -weed and the 

 white trinities of the arrow-head yet 



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