THE OTTER. 
NATURE, children, as you observe, 
gave my family a handsome 
coat. Now no bird can have 
fine feathers, nor beast a fine fur 
but men and women desire them for 
adornment, or possibly to keep them- 
selves warm. So the hunters, finding it 
a paying business, shoot and trap us till 
places which once knew the Otter 
know us no more. 
Such gentle animals as we are, too. 
No little girl or boy would care to have 
a more frolicsome playmate than a 
young cub Otter. He will romp with 
you, and play with Dog or Cat and sit up 
on his hindquarters, and whistle and do 
even many quaint tricks to make you 
laugh. 
To make him happy you must have 
a little pond in the yard or a large 
tank, though he will run about the 
yard or house most of the time with 
the Dog. Feed him at first on bread 
and milk, then on fish, though you can 
train him to do without the latter and 
eat the "leavings" from the table. 
Such fun as we Otters that live in 
the Northern part of the United States 
and Canada do have in winter. No 
school-boy enjoys coasting down hill 
more than we do. Though we live in 
the water, you may say, and are known 
as the fastest-swimming quadrupeds, 
yet, in spite of our short legs, we can 
run over land tolerably well, too. So 
we trudge along till we come to a high 
hill, well covered with snow; up we 
scramble to the top, lie down flat on 
our smooth jackets, bend our fore feet 
backward and, giving ourselves a shove 
with our hind legs, down we slide head- 
foremost. Such fun as it is! Not till 
we get hungry or too tired to jog up 
the hill any more do we give it up for 
that day. 
In summer we enjoy the same sport, 
too. How? Oh, all we want is a clay- 
bank with a good muddy surface, and 
down we go to turn a somersault into 
the water of the creek below. "Shoot- 
ing the chutes" you little people would 
call it, I suppose, though we call it our 
"slide." 
Our homes are always on the banks 
of a stream. We begin to burrow three 
or four feet below the surface of the 
water, forming a tunnel which leads to 
a chamber in the bank high and dry. 
That is called our den and we line it 
with grass and live very comfortably. 
Being a hunted animal our senses are 
very acute. When on land we are 
always on the alert and, at the approach 
of danger, down we go into the water 
and hide in our dens. After sunset we 
go out to fish. We beat the surface of 
the water with our tails and frighten 
the scaly fellows so that they seek 
refuge under stones or in holes in the 
bank. Then we catch our Fish. For 
a change we eat Crabs, Frogs, and 
sometimes small birds. 
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