retching-rings and cutting-boards and fashioning rabbit-snares and
overhauling wicked-looking iron traps, which were quite ugly enough
even before they became stained and clotted and rusted with blood.

They had a very successful season, but even at the first it struck me as
odd to see two men, not outwardly debased, so soberly intent on their
game of killing. And in the end I got sick of the big blood-rusted traps
and the stretching-rings and the blood-smeared cutting-boards and the
smell of pelts being cured. For every pelt, I began to see, meant pain
and death. In one trap Francois found only the foot of a young red fox:
it had gnawed its leg off to gain freedom from those vicious iron jaws
that had bitten so suddenly into its flesh and bone and sinew. He also
told me of finding a young bear which had broken the anchor-chain of a
twelve-pound trap and dragged it over one hundred miles. All the fight,
naturally, was gone out of the little creature. It was whimpering like a
woman when Francois came up with it--poor little tortured broken-hearted
thing! And some empty-headed heiress goes mincing into the Metropolitan,
on a Caruso night, very proud and peacocky over her new ermine coat,
without ever dreaming it's a patchwork of animal sufferings that is
keeping her fat body warm, and that she's trying to make herself
beautiful in a hundred tragedies of the wild.

If women only thought of these things! But we women have a very
convenient hand-made imagination all our own, and what upsets us as
perfect ladies we graciously avoid. Yet if the petticoated Vandal in
that ermine coat were compelled to behold from her box-chair in the
Metropolitan, not a musty old love-affair set to music, but the
spectacle of how each little animal whose skin she has appropriated
had been made to suffer, the hours and sometimes days of torture it
had endured, and how, if still alive when the trapper made the rounds
of his sets, it had been carefully strangled to death by that frugal
harvester, to the end that the pelt might not be bloodied and reckoned
only as a "second"--if the weasel-decked lady, I repeat, had to
witness all this with her own beaded eyes, our wilderness would not be
growing into quite such a lonely wilderness.

Or some day, let's put it, as one of these beaver-clad ladies tripped
through the Ramble in Central Park, supposing a steel-toothed trap
suddenly and quite unexpectedly snapped shut on her silk-stockinged
ankle and s