mine.

"Das Noel Waby's trap. Nobody else make-um tukpeel stick like
dat," he said at last.

Then I understood. Noel Waby had gone up river trapping in the
spring, and had never come back; nor any word to tell how death
met him.

I stooped down to examine the trap with greater interest. On the
underside of the fall-log I found some long hairs still clinging
in the crevices of the rough bark. They belonged to the outer
waterproof coat with which Keeonekh keeps his fur dry. One otter
at least had been caught here, and the trap reset. But some sense
of danger, some old scent of blood or subtle warning clung to the
spot, and no other creature had crossed the bed log, though
hundreds must have passed that way since the old Indian reset his
trap, and strode away with the dead otter across his shoulders.

What was it in the air? What sense of fear brooded here and
whispered in the alder leaves and tinkled in the brook? Simmo
grew uneasy and hurried away. He was like the wood folk. But I
sat down on a great log that the spring floods had driven in
through the alders to feel the meaning of the place, if possible,
and to have the vast sweet solitude all to myself for a little
while.

A faint stir on my left, and another! Then up the path, twisting
and gliding, came Keeonekh, the first otter that I had ever seen
in the wilderness. Where the sun flickered in through the alder