372 
[March ii, 1911. 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
their skins I have had but one skin where the 
otter had taken his foot off, and I have known 
of but two other cases. In one instance the 
trap was set just at nightfall and was looked 
very early the next morning and the Indian 
trapper showed me the foot that forenoon. It 
was evidently the foot of a young otter. In the 
other case, a year after the foot was taken, the 
otter was tracked on a late snow back from the 
stream and found in a hollow log with two 
young. She had a nest made of shredded cedar 
bark. I have known of their having dens in 
ledges, but this is the only instance I know of 
one’s denning in a log. 
Usually otters have but two young, but I 
have known of their having three. Some 
writers speak of more, but I very much doubt 
their having more than three. 
Otters seldom stay more than a few days in 
one place no matter how plentiful the fish are. 
The Indians say: “Otter don’t happy in 
Heaven.” A family will have a route which 
they will follow as regularly as a Methodist 
circuit rider. Sometimes it will be only fifteen 
or twenty miles, but oftener twice as much, 
which round they will make in from two to 
four weeks, going through chains of ponds, up 
or down streams and sometimes making carries 
on land for quite long distances, sometimes 
meeting others, but oftener one party coming 
into a pond soon after another has left. When 
one sees tracks of otters leaving the water and 
going overland, he may be sure that they are 
taking the shortest route to some other water. 
In winter otters make fishing holes through 
quite thick ice just as seals do. As their noses 
are formed so as to shut air-tight they can 
swim across large ponds under the ice just as 
beaver or muskrats do, by putting their noses 
against the ice and throwing out a bubble, which 
looks like that in a spirit level, and renewing 
their breath by drawing it in again. If not 
disturbed they can swim any distance in this 
way; but if driven away from their air-bubble, 
they soon drown. 
In places where the snow drifts deep over 
the banks on the edges of streams or ponds, 
they often have places under the snow banks 
where they bring out their fish and eat them. 
Often the fur of otters taken in the winter 
has the long outer hairs curled or kinked at 
the end like card teeth. This is called “sun 
curl” by the fur buyers and is supposed to be 
caused by the reflection of the sun from the ice. 
Yet this hardly seems a satisfactory explanation 
as I have seen them as badly curled early in 
December as at any time late in the winter; but 
I have never seen one taken after the ice was 
out that was so curled. 
How deep an otter dives when fishing no one 
knows, but I know positively of two cases where 
otters were taken on lines set for togue with 
live bait in deep water. One was on Moose- 
head Lake, the other in one of the Roach River 
Ponds, probably in not less than twenty feet of 
water. In these cases the otters got hooked in 
catching the live bait, just as the togue would 
have done, and as the line was fastened to a 
spring pole which would bend, and as he could 
not get his feet on bottom, he drowned much 
quicker than a fish would have drowned. 
I once knew of a man. who was pulling a 
pickerel through a hole in the ice, feeling a 
suddenly increased resistance which continued 
until he hauled the head of an otter into sight. 
The otter had seized the pickerel as it was being 
drawn up and had held on until he saw the man, 
when he bit the fish in two and left the fisher¬ 
man in possession of the head part. Sometimes 
large fish escape from otters, and I once saw 
a large pickerel whose back was deformed, evi¬ 
dently from having been bitten by an otter, as 
the scar was plainly to be seen on both sides. 
While in handling over half a million of 
muskrats, I have seen but a single albino, yet 
in handling not over a hundredth part as many 
otters I have seen five pure white ones and 
another of a yellowish white. As these were 
all taken within a few years in quite a limited 
area, it seemed as if the albinism were trans¬ 
mitted, especially as R. McFarlane, the Hudson 
Bay factor, while he speaks of sometimes see- 
SKULLS OF CATS AND SABRE TOOTH TIGERS. 
ing white beaver and some other kinds, does 
not mention ever seeing an albino otter. It is 
a singular thing, that of the five pure white 
ones that I know, three were shot. I saw two 
of them before they were skinned. I he fourth 
was said to have been caught by a man in his 
hands as the otter was diving into a hole in the 
ice; he was held till he drowned. I had the 
skin of this one. It was a very large skin and 
as white as “the driven snow” and showed no 
mark of either trap or bullet. I do not know 
how the fifth was taken, but it seemed singular 
that when not one otter in twenty is taken 
except in traps, that four out of five white ones 
should not have been trapped. I know of one 
other white otter being taken near where these 
were. Besides these, I have in over sixty years 
never heard of but three others being taken, 
one in New Brunswick and bought by C. & 
E. Everett, King’s Square, St. John, N. B., and 
the others taken in Maine, one at Blue Hill and 
the other in the western part of the State. 
Manly Hardy. 
Ancestry of the Cats. 
The lion, the wildcat and the domestic tabby, 
while differing much from each other, have also 
many points in common. One of these is the 
substantial similarity in size of the canine teeth. 
In Tertiary times many cats existed of which a 
number equalled or exceeded in size the largest 
living species. These old time cats are distin¬ 
guished by a great enlargement of the upper 
canine teeth which thus become long curved flat¬ 
tened tusks. One of these sabre-toothed tigers 
we have heard of as existing in Northern Europe 
as contemporary of the cave bear and the hairy 
rhinoceros, and in the middle and later Tertiary 
there were many such forms, which possessed 
these great canine teeth in various degrees of 
specialization. Of true cats in which the upper 
and lower canine teeth are of nearly equal size 
none are known, until near the end of Tertiary 
times. 
Dr. W. D. Matthew, of the American Museum 
of Natural History has- recently published a 
paper on the ancestry of the cats. It is far too 
technical for reproduction, but his view is that 
the cats of the present day are descended from 
one of the less specialized sabre-toothed tigers, 
perhaps that known as Dinictis or some related 
form. Dr. Matthew believes that while the 
modern cats use the canine teeth for grasping, 
holding and tearing, these ancient sabre-toothed 
forms used those teeth for striking a downward 
blow with the mouth wide open, thus ripping or 
gashing the thick skinned slow-moving pachy¬ 
derms on which they preyed. Objection to this 
theory has been made on the ground that the 
animal could not open its mouth wide enough to 
give such a blow effectively, but Dr. Matthew 
advances proofs for his belief that it was possible 
for these animals to open the mouth as suggested. 
He says of the life of those far distant times 
that the large and abundant vegetable feeders of 
the early and middle Tertiary were chiefly thick- 
skinned short-necked animals, powerful and well 
adapted for fighting, but not swift of foot. Dur¬ 
ing the later Tertiary a different set of animals - 
made their appearance, thin-skinned, long-legged, 
slender-necked horses and ruminants; swift run¬ 
ners, but far less powerful and well armed than 
the pachyderms. The larger cats prey upon the 
larger ruminants and usually fasten on the back 
of the animal and bite through the neck, but the 
sabre tooth tigers—if Prof. Matthew’s theory is 
correct—preyed on the large pachyderms, ripping 
and gashing the neck until the animal succumbed. 
As the various pachyderms increased in size and 
strength they grew fewer in numbers and de¬ 
veloped defensive armor in the shape of thick 
skins, like the rhinoceros, elephant, tapir and 
pigs of to-day. Thus they became harder to 
kill by the great sabre-toothed cats, and finally, 
as the pachyderms grew scarcer and their geo¬ 
graphical range became more limited, the sabre 
tooths became extinct. 
The accompanying cuts, taken from Dr. Mat¬ 
thew’s paper, show various types of cat skulls, 
the line marked C showing our ordinary moun¬ 
tain lion and an ancient sabre tooth. These dia¬ 
grams show Dr. Matthew’s idea of the way in 
which the sabre-toothed tigers opened their 
mouths. 
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