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There is an old saying among trappers that nothing catches game like a neglected trap; and that time at least the adage was correct. The boys found a marten in the second trap and found others at frequent intervals. What was remarkable, they found three minks, two ermines and a fisher in traps on high, hilly forest land.

He has learned how to turn a Porcupine on his back, and, as you have already found out, the under part of the Porcupine is unprotected. "Just why Pekan should be called Fisher, I don't know. True, he eats fish when he can get them, but he isn't a water animal and doesn't go fishing as do Billy Mink and Little Joe Otter. His food is much the same as that of Spite the Marten.

Out upon a white finger of sand lumbered a big black bear with two cubs, and even the cubs took to the water, and swam across easily. Kazan watched them, and whined to Gray Wolf. And then out upon that white finger of sand came other things that dreaded the water as Gray Wolf dreaded it: a big fat porcupine, a sleek little marten, a fisher-cat that sniffed the air and wailed like a child.

Sometimes he thinks they change into wild cats, and then a nail grows on the end of their tails; but these wild cats are not the same as the marten cats, who have been always in the woods. The foxes were once tame, as the cats are now, but they ran away and became wild.

"Little Marten cried very much when he was put into the one-horse chaise with Squire Broom. "'Oh, let me stay with Susan! let me live with Susan! he said. "'What! said Squire Broom, 'and never learn to read? You must go to school to learn to read, and other things a man should know. "'Susan shall teach me to read, said little Marten.

It was in those days that his friend formed so lofty an estimate of his exactness in figures and his skill in saving, and thus it had happened that when the engine constructed by Wilberforce began to pay him so past belief, he was really in the perplexity concerning places of deposit which he had expressed to Marten.

Even the tracks of the little people such ferocious hunters as marten and ermine were gone from the snow. There were no tracks of caribou or moose; the grouse had seemingly buried in the drifts. The only creatures that had not hidden away from the winter cold were the wolves and the coyotes, furtive people that could not be coaxed into the range of Virginia's pistol.

But the Master sat with silent soul, though he sang the songs of magic, and so passed into the night, but came forth again into sunlight. And there was a lonely wigwam on the bank, into which he bore Marten and the grandmother, and saying, "Numchahse! arise!" lo, they arose, and deemed they had only slept. It will strike every student of classic lore as almost identical with much that he has read.

All the creatures of the woodlands shook off the drowsy laziness of summer and came down from the uplands seeking haunts for winter retreat. Moose and deer were on the move. Beaver came splashing down-stream to plaster up their wattled homes before frost. Bear and lynx and marten, all were restless as the autumn winds instinct with coming storm.

The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten, have disappeared; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the mink is less common than formerly. Perhaps of all our untamed quadrupeds, the fox has obtained the widest and most familiar reputation, from the time of Pilpay and Aesop to the present day. His recent tracks still give variety to a winter's walk.