She Bay of the Band 
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 bya 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 
go 
