scent. But the tracks betrayed which way musquash was travelling; so the
trapper goes on, knowing if he does not find the little haycock houses
on this side, he can cross to the other.

[Illustration: Fort MacPherson, now the most northerly post of the
Hudson's Bay Company, beyond tree line; hence the houses are built of
imported timber, with thatch roofs.]

Presently, he almost stumbles over what sent the musk-rat diving just at
this place. It is the wreck of a wolverine's ravage--a little wattled
dome-shaped house exposed to that arch-destroyer by the shrinking of the
swamp. So shallow has the water become, that a wolverine has easily
waded and leaped clear across to the roof of the musk-rat's house. A
beaver-dam two feet thick cannot resist the onslaught of the wolverine's
claws; how much less will this round nest of reeds and grass and
mosses cemented together with soft clay? The roof has been torn from the
domed house, leaving the inside bare and showing plainly the domestic
economy of the musk-rat home, smooth round walls inside, a floor or
gallery of sticks and grasses, where the family had lived in an air
chamber above the water, rough walls below the water-line and two or
three little openings that must have been safely under water before the
swamp receded. Perhaps a mussel or lily bulb has been left in the
deserted larder. From the oozy slime below the mid-floor to the
topmost wall will not measure more than two or three feet. If the
swamp had not dried here, the stupid little musk-rats that escaped the
ravager's claws would probably have come back to the wrecked house,
built up the torn roof, and gone on living in danger till another
wolverine came. But a water doorway the musk-rat must have. That he has
learned by countless assaults on his house-top, so when the marsh
retreated the musk-rats abandoned their house.

All about the deserted house are runways, tiny channels across oozy
peninsulas and islands of the musk-rat's diminutive world such as a very
small beaver might make. The trapper jumps across to a dry patch or
mound in the midst of the slimy bottom and prods an earth bank with a
stick. It is as he thought--hollow; a musk-rat burrow or gallery in the
clay wall where the refugees from this house had scuttled from the
wolverine. But now all is deserted. The water has shrunk--that was the
danger signal to the musk-rat; and there had been a grand moving to a
deeper part of the swamp. Perhaps, after