June 4 , igio.] 
FOREST AND STREAM.. 
889 
in what I thought was a good place. Rufus 
said that we already had traps enough for fisher, 
and if I was foolish enough to make one he 
would look on and see me do it. So he lay on 
the ground while I built the trap. I made a 
trap with a double bed piece, as we often do 
for fisher, and when done Rufus said that it 
was a good trap, but I should never get any¬ 
thing in it. To-day, when he was within two 
traps of it, he found a sable trap destroyed by 
fisher. The next one was also torn to pieces and 
on reaching my fisher trap there; was the fisher 
just caught and still alive. Had this trap not been 
there he would have destroyed the rest of our 
line, as they and bears will often follow and de¬ 
stroy a long line and sometimes will repeat the 
operation when the line is rebuilt.” 
The fisher is also called Pennant’s marten, 
pekan and blackcat. Although so often called a 
cat, Longfellow was correct when he spoke of 
‘'ojeeb, the fisher-weasel,” as he belongs to the 
weasel family. I have weighed quite a number 
and the smallest weighed eight and a quarter 
pounds, the largest twelve and a half pounds, 
or very nearly the weight of house cats. It 
seems almost incredible that so light an animal 
can kill a deer, but I know positively that they 
not only kill fawns, but that they can and do 
kill large old bucks in the fall when deer are 
the strongest. They do this by biting the jugular 
vein. In handling some thousands of their skins 
I have seldom seen as large a skin as that from 
the one weighing twelve and a half pounds and 
so conclude that few ever exceed that weight. 
Although called fisher I have never known of 
their catching a fish, though they will eat fish. 
They feed largely on rabbits w'hich in some 
cases they catch by running them down. J. G. 
Rich, of Bethel, Me., once wrote of seeing one 
run a rabbit down on Richardson’s Lake, and in 
1861 I saw one run a rabbit into the Allegash 
River and shot the fisher while the rabbit was 
crouching low on a gravel bed to which he had 
swum. Perhaps I ought to say again that by 
rabbit we here always mean the showshoe 
rabbit, or varying hare, not the cottontail. 
Although a large part of the fisher’s food is 
rabbits, I think that they prefer porcupine to 
anything else when these are to be had. The 
quills of a porcupine often cause’ the death of 
other animals, but they do not seem to injure 
fisher in the least. I have had brought to me 
raccoon, fox and wildcat which seem to have 
died from the effects of porcupine quills, with 
which their necks were filled; but I have seen 
hundreds of fisher skins where there were many 
quills lying flat in the skin, largely on the head 
and neck and lower part of the back, and there 
was no sign of any suppuration or sore of any 
kind. As it is the rule rather than the excep¬ 
tion for fisher skins to have porcupine quills in 
them, I have probably seen more than a thou¬ 
sand which showed quills. I do not think it 
would be exaggeration to say that I have seen 
twice that number. I have seen the remains 
where a fisher had eaten a porcupine and the 
skin showed that the fisher had opened the por¬ 
cupine along the belly and had eaten out about 
everything inside, leaving nearly the whole skin 
in one piece exactly as I have seen where a 
raccoon had eaten skunks which they had 
taken from the traps. Napoleon A. Comeau, on 
page 80 of his book on the “Life and Sport 
on the North Shore,” speaks of catching forty 
fisher in his life, every one of which had por¬ 
cupine quills in him. As most people know, 
these quills are armed with many minute re¬ 
curved barbs near the point, and they will work 
into the flesh, often in the case of a dog, when 
they have not been removed, working from the 
mouth through to the back of the head, some¬ 
times causing death. I think that the fisher 
swallows very few quills, but gets them from 
being slapped by the tail of the porcupine while 
eating him. 
Fisher seem to prefer a hilly country and the 
passes between high hills, probably because this 
is good ground for porcupines. While they 
travel long distances they have regular dens, 
the same as raccoons, usually in hollow logs or 
in ledges, but sometimes in standing hollow trees. 
I think that for his size and weight a fisher 
can whip any other animal in Maine. I think 
FIG. IO—STUB TRAP FOR FISHER. 
that a fisher of ten pounds’ weight would whip 
a wildcat of thirty pounds so quickly that it 
could hardly be called a fight. While a fisher 
can be treed by any small dog, the same as a 
lynx or a wildcat, there are very few dogs that 
have much business with a fisher if he has a 
fair chance. An Indian friend once told me 
that he was hunting moose and had with him 
a very large bull dog which he thought could 
whip anything of his size. While looking for 
moose they struck a fresh fisher track and fol¬ 
lowed it till it went into a hollow log. As the 
entrance was large he sent the dog in, and set¬ 
ting his gun against a tree, stood at the mouth 
of the log listening to the fight going on inside. 
He was expecting to see the dog back out with 
the fisher in his mouth, but in a few minutes the 
dog came out head first with the fisher following 
and chasing him. The fisher jumped over the 
dog and the dog ran away so thoroughly whip¬ 
ped that he could not be induced to take the 
track again. He said that the dog’s head was 
all bitten and scratched up. 
A raccoon in a trap is bad enough, but a fisher 
is a fiend incarnate. Unless the trap is set with 
a balance pole, it will not be long before he has 
taken his foot off, or got away with the trap, 
either by gnawing the stake off or by breaking 
the chain, or else has killed himself fighting the 
trap. 
1 have known of but one case of a fisher being 
found with newly born young. This was at 
East Grand Lake on the St. Croix. A bark¬ 
peeling crew cut down a hemlock to peel, and 
in a hollow in it found the nest of a fisher with 
four small young. This was late in May. 
Usually fisher travel alone, though I have known 
of several being found in company, but I think 
this very unusual. 
‘ Nov. 9 . Last night after we had skinned and 
stretched our catch Rufus and I talked things 
over. ’ I had no snowshoes except an old pair 
of which only the fi 1 ling of heads and toes re¬ 
mained, which I had brought home from an old 
lumber camp to use in case of emergency. As 
the year before I had carried snowshoes and 
did not need them, and in common years they 
are not needed till December, I was unprovided 
for the unusual conditions. We now had ten 
inches of snow and it looked as if more were 
coming soon. It was twenty miles to Chesun- 
cook where was the first house, and fifty more 
to get to Katahdin Iron Works, the first point 
where I could reach a stage. If I got snowed 
in I should have to lie still until the tote roads 
were broken out, so finally it was agreed for me 
to start this morning. I agreed to give Rufus 
what was in the traps and what provisions were 
left, enough to last him a month, and he was to 
go a day’s travel with me and camp with me 
one night, taking back the blankets; from that 
point I would go through alone. Rufus disliked 
to have me leave, but knew that it was the only 
safe thing for me to do. We both had intended 
to stay until about Dec. 1 and come out together, 
but the winter had come down upon us a month 
sooner than usual and we had to make the best 
of it. So we sat up till after midnight cook¬ 
ing for the journey and getting things in shape 
to leave. 
“We started as soon as we could see to travel, 
taking a ridge parallel with the lake. Before 
we had gone far we started the smallest bear 
I ever saw the track of. He certainly could not 
have weighed more than twenty-five pounds. By 
accident he chose to travel just the way we were 
going and we were on his track for at least 
half a mile, in which time we crossed a fisher 
track that was as large as the bear’s. 
“Besides my rifle I had a pack of about forty 
pounds and Rufus had nearly the same, and as 
there was no road and some ten inches of snow 
we could not travel more than a mile and a half 
an hour. About noon we had to cross a black 
ash swamp where the slosh came nearly to the 
tops of our boots and the scraggly black alders 
troubled us by catching in our packs. At the 
edge of this swamp we came out to Loon Stream 
near the lake and directly opposite to us across 
the stream were two men. I was in advance 
and seeing them first asked if they were tending 
ferry. One of them replied: ‘You can’t do 
that again in a million years,’ referring to our 
coming directly to them. The stream here was 
some fifteen feet wide and over one’s head and 
the black ice looked rather risky. Both men 
were carrying long poles and at my suggestion 
one of them reached the end of his pole across 
and I fastened my pack to it with my belt and 
he drew it across on the ice. Then I took hold 
and he pulled me over. Rufus was ferried 
across in the same way.” 
