152 Wilderness Ways. 



wonder. Suddenly a catapult seemed to strike the 

 muskrat from beneath and lift him clear from the 

 water. With a tremendous rush and sputter Huk- 

 weem came out beneath him, her great pointed bill 

 driven through to his spine. Little need of my help 

 now. With another straight hard drive, this time at 

 eye and brain, she flung him aside disdainfully and 

 rushed to her shivering little ones, questioning, chid- 

 ing, praising them, all in the same breath, fluttering 

 and cackling low in an hysteric wave of tenderness. 

 Then she swam twice around the dead muskrat and 

 led her brood away from the place. 



Perhaps it was to one of those same little ones that 

 I owe a service for which I am more than grateful. It 

 was in September, when I was at a lake ten miles 

 away — the same lake into which a score of frolicking 

 young loons gathered before moving south, and swam 

 a race or two for my benefit. I was lost one day, 

 hopelessly lost, in trying to make my way from a wild 

 little lake where I had been fishing, to the large lake 

 where my camp was. It was late afternoon. To 

 avoid the long hard tramp down a river, up which 

 I had come in the early morning, I attempted to cut 

 across through unbroken forest without a compass. 

 Traveling through a northern forest in summer is 

 desperately hard work. The moss is ankle deep, the 



