V THE BADGER AND HIS KIN 1 33 



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 



