e wings of the owl, the owl can light within six feet of a
person's head, and if the owl was not seen, you would not know of its
presence, for you could not hear the flight of the owl.

While I have not had as much experience in the haunts of the panther
as some, yet I have been all through the Pacific Coast States and a
good part of the mountains, and have never heard what I thought was
the cry of a panther, or a mountain lion.

My father often told me that he had never heard anything that he
called a screech of panther and did not think that a panther ever
made any such screeching noise as is claimed, yet in my younger days
it was a frequent occurrence to hear some one tell of hearing a
panther and how a panther had followed them through a certain piece
of woods. Even to this day we occasionally hear of some one being
followed by a panther and how they had heard a panther screeching on
a certain hill.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Handling Raw Furs and Other Notes.

Boys, as you are nearly all in from the trap line and the trail,
(May, 1910), I am going to take the opportunity to give the younger
trappers (and some of the older ones, too) a drubbing. I would like
to see every trapper get all that his furs are worth and I would not
like to see one-half the value of your furs go, simply because you
neglected to skin and stretch your catch as it should be.

During the past winter I was in town one day and met a fur buyer and
he asked me to go over and see his bunch of furs, saying, "I am going
to ship the furs tomorrow." I went with the fur dealer and found that
he had a lot of stuff, several hundred dollars worth of furs,
consisting of fox, coon, skunk, mink, and muskrat, some wildcat. A
good part of this bunch of furs had been caught at least a month
before it should have been. Of this unprime fur I will have but
little to say. I am sorry to know that any trapper will throw away
his time and money by trapping furs before the fur is in reasonably
prime condition.

This dealer had many coon and skunk that had from one-half to a pound
of grease left on the skin. I asked the dealer if he was going to
ship those pelts with all that grease on. His reply was, that he was
going to ship the furs just as they were and added that he did not
pay anything for that fat, and only half what the skins were worth if
they had been handled right. I suggested that he would have to pay
express charges on that grease. The dealer said that he