114 Wilderness Ways. 



and shadows of the hillside, and so hides hiniself — in 

 plain sight, sometimes, like a young partridge — that 

 he manages to keep a clean record in the notebook 

 where you hoped to write down all about him. 



In winter you cross his tracks, great round tracks 

 that wander everywhere through the big woods, and 

 you think: Now I shall find him surely. But though 

 you follow for miles and learn much about him, finding 

 where he passed this rabbit close at hand, without 

 suspecting it, and caught that one by accident, and 

 missed the partridge that burst out of the snow under 

 his very feet, — still Upweekis himself remains only a 

 shadow of the woods. Once, after a glorious long tramp 

 on his trail, I found the spot where he had been sleep- 

 ing a moment before. But beside that experience I 

 must put fifty other trails that I have followed, of 

 which I never saw the end nor the beginning. And 

 whenever I have found out anything about Upweekis 

 it has generally come unexpectedly, as most good 

 things do. 



Once the chance came as I was watching a muskrat 

 at his supper. It was twilight in the woods. I had 

 drifted in close to shore in my canoe to see what 

 Musquash was doing on top of a rock. All muskrats 

 have favorite eating places — a rock, a stranded log, a 

 tree boll that leans out over the water, and always a 



