night's feeding. Up on the burned hillside the partridges said,
quit, quit! when I appeared, and jumped to a tree and craned
their necks to see what I was. The black ducks skulked in the
reeds. They were full-grown now and strong of wing, but the early
hiding habit was not yet broken up by shooting. They would glide
through the sedges, and double the bogs, and crouch in a tangle
till the canoe was almost upon them, when with a rush and a
frightened hark-ark! they shot into the air and away to the
river. The mink, changing from brown to black, gave up his
nest-robbing for honest hunting, undismayed by trap or deadfall;
and up in the inlet I could see grassy domes rising above the
bronze and gold of the marsh, where Musquash was building thick
and high for winter cold and spring floods. Truly it was good to
be here, and to enter for a brief hour into the shy, wild but
unharried life of the wood folk.

A big bullfrog showed his head among the lily pads, and the
little rifle, unmindful of the joys of an unharried existence,
rose slowly to its place. My eye was glancing along the sights
when a sudden movement in the alders on the shore, above and
beyond the unconscious head of Chigwooltz the frog, spared him
for a little season to his lily pads and his minnow hunting. At
the same moment a kingfisher went rattling by to his old perch
over the minnow pool. The alders swayed again as if struck; a
huge bear lumbered out of them to the shore, with a disgruntled
woof! at some twig that had switched his ear too sharply.

I slid lower in the canoe till only my head and shoulders were
visible. Mooween went nosing along-shore till something--a
dead fish or a mussel bed--touched his appetite, when he