v THE BADGER AND HIS KIN 133 
as through snow on land, leaving a track eight 
inches wide, more or less, with the now frozen 
snow shoved up two inches above the general 
level on each side. . . . I saw where these creat- 
ures had been playing, sliding or fishing, appar- 
ently to-day, on the snow-covered rocks, on which 
for a rod upwards, and as much in width, the snow 
was trodden and worn quite smooth, as if twenty 
had trodden and slid there for several hours. 
Their droppings are a mass of fishes’ scales and 
bones, loose, scaly, black masses. ... The river 
was all tracked up with otters from Bittern Cliff 
upward, Sometimes one had trailed his tail edge- 
wise, making a mark like the tail of a deer-mouse; 
sometimes they were moving fast, and there was 
an interval of five feet between the tracks... . 
These very conspicuous tracks generally com- 
menced and terminated at some button-bush or 
willow where black ice now marked the hole of 
that date. ... In many places the otters ap- 
peared to have gone floundering along in the 
slushy ice and water.” 
But even Thoreau did not see the animal itself, 
then nor at any other time, though once one 
crawled past the.door of his Walden house in the 
night and set him a-thinking — but it didn’t need 
a noble otter to do that! 
Dr. Charles Abbott saw them several times, 
twenty or thirty years ago, in the Delaware and 
its tributaries near Trenton; Merriam mentions 
