d when the young birds had flown
away to the South, I took down the nest which I had helped to build,
and hung it in my study as a souvenir of my bright little neighbors.

VI. THE BUILDERS.

[Illustration]

A curious bit of wild life came to me at dusk one day in the
wilderness. It was midwinter, and the snow lay deep. I was sitting
alone on a fallen tree, waiting for the moon to rise so that I could
follow the faint snowshoe track across a barren, three miles, then
through a mile of forest to another trail that led to camp. I had
followed a caribou too far that day, and this was the result--feeling
along my own track by moonlight, with the thermometer sinking rapidly
to the twenty-below-zero point.

There is scarcely any twilight in the woods; in ten minutes it would
be quite dark; and I was wishing that I had blankets and an axe, so
that I could camp where I was, when a big gray shadow came stealing
towards me through the trees. It was a Canada lynx. My fingers gripped
the rifle hard, and the right mitten seemed to slip off of itself as I
caught the glare of his fierce yellow eyes.

But the eyes were not looking at me at all. Indeed, he had not noticed
me. He was stealing along, crouched low in the snow, his ears back,
his stub tail twitching nervously, his whole attention fixed tensely
on something beyond me out on the barren. I wanted his beautiful skin;
but I wanted more to find out what he was after; so I kept still and
watched.

At the edge of the barren he crouched under a dwarf spruce, settled
himself deeper in the snow by a wriggle or two till his feet were well
under him and his balance perfect, and the red fire blazed in his eyes
and his big muscles quivered. Then he hurled himself forward--one,
two, a dozen mighty bounds through flying snow, and he landed with a
screech on the dome of a beaver house. There he jumped about, shaking
an imaginary beaver like a fury, and gave another screech that made
one's spine tingle. That over, he stood very still, looking off over
the beaver roofs that dotted the shore of a little pond there. The
blaze died out of his eyes; a different look crept into them. He put
his nose down to a tiny hole in the mound, the beavers' ventilator,
and took a long sniff, while his whole body seemed to distend with the
warm rich odor that poured up into his hungry nostrils. Then he rolled
his head sadly, and went away.

Now all that was pure acting. A lynx likes beaver meat