aster and hid her family. To one side, the hawk had been dropped
among the rushes. The man pokes a stick in the lair but finds nothing.
Putting in his hand, he is dragging out bones, feathers, skeleton
musk-rats, putrid frogs, promiscuous remnants of other quarries brought
to the burrow by the mink, when a little cattish _s-p-i-t!_ almost
touches his hand. His palm closes over something warm, squirming,
smaller than a kitten with very downy fur, on a soft mouse-like skin,
eyes that are still blind and a tiny mouth that neither meows nor
squeaks, just _spits!--spits!--spits!_--in impotent viperish fury. All
the other minklets, the mother had succeeded in hiding under the
grasses, but somehow this one had been left. Will he take it home and
try the experiment of rearing a young mink with a family of kittens?

The trapper calls to mind other experiments. There was the little beaver
that chewed up his canoe and gnawed a hole of escape through the door.
There were the three little bob-cats left in the woods behind his cabin
last year when he refrained from setting out traps and tied up his dog
to see if he could not catch the whole family, mother and kittens, for
an Eastern museum. Furtively at first, the mother had come to feed her
kittens. Then the man had put out rugs to keep the kittens warm and lain
in wait for the mother; but no sooner did she see her offspring
comfortably cared for, than she deserted them entirely, evidently acting
on the proverb that the most gracious enemy is the most dangerous, or
else deciding that the kits were so well off that she was not needed.
Adopting the three little wild-cats, the trapper had reared them past
blind-eyes, past colic and dumps and all the youthful ills to which live
kittens are heirs, when trouble began. The longing for the wilds came.
Even catnip green and senna tea boiled can't cure that. So keenly did
the gipsy longing come to one little bob that he perished escaping to
the woods by way of the chimney flue. The second little bob succeeded in
escaping through a parchment stop-gap that served the trapper as a
window. And the third bobby dealt such an ill-tempered gash to the dog's
nose that the combat ended in instant death for the cat.

Thinking over these experiments, the trapper wisely puts the mink back
in the nest with words which it would have been well for that litle ball
of down to have understood. He told it he would come back for it next
winter and to be sure to h