and took down the skin of a silver fox. He held it on his palm for a
moment, looking at it in an interested, satisfied way, then he brought it
over and put it into the child's hands; and the smile now shaped itself,
as he saw an eager pale face buried in the soft fur.

"Good! good!" he said involuntarily.

"Bon! bon!" said the boy's voice from the fur, in the language of his
mother, who added a strain of Indian blood to her French ancestry.

The two sat there, the man half-kneeling on the low bed, and stroking the
fur very gently. It could scarcely be thought that such pride should be
spent on a little pelt by a mere backwoodsman and his nine-year-old son.
One has seen a woman fingering a splendid necklace, her eyes fascinated
by the bunch of warm, deep jewels--a light not of mere vanity, or hunger,
or avarice in her face--only the love of the beautiful thing. But this
was an animal's skin. Did they feel the animal underneath it yet, giving
it beauty, life, glory?

The silver-fox skin is the prize of the north, and this one was of the
boy's own harvesting. While his father was away he saw the fox creeping
by the hut. The joy of the hunter seized him, and guided his eye over the
sights of his father's rifle, as he rested the barrel on the window-sill,
and the animal was his! Now his finger ran into the hole made by the
bullet, and he gave a little laugh of modest triumph. Minutes passed as
they studied, felt, and admired the skin, the hunter proud of his son,
the son alive with a primitive passion, which inflicts suffering to get
the beautiful thing. Perhaps the tenderness as well as the wild passion
of the animal gets into the hunter's blood, and tips his fingers at times
with an exquisite kindness--as one has noted in a lion fondling her