I have met in the wilderness several white men whose hobby was to raise strange pets, either for their own pleasure or to add a little to what ever income they derived from the country they lived in. But old C... was the star of them all.

During all the years I have known him, I have never seen him once without some peculiar animal at his door step.

First it was a bear. The brute was full grown and tied to a tree by a chain. It allowed his master to stroke him but was dangerous to anyone else. It had made friends with a little Indian dog and used to sleep with the pup clasped between its front paws. After that, it was a family of skunks—a mother and five young ones. They were as tame as cats and roamed in and out of the shack at their own free will. It was a good thing that the neighbors were few and far between for, if the wood pussies did not pay the slightest attention to C..., on the other hand they resented bitterly the presence of any stranger on the premises.

Later on, my friend tried his hand at wild lynx. There had been a great migration of those animals that summer and he was able to lasso eighteen as they swam across the lakes and rivers in the neighborhood.

He put the whole lot in an old bunk house near his shack and used to feed them once a day on fish. It was a great sight. The old man would enter most unconcernedly while the eighteen lynx hurled themselves from one end of the bunk house to the other, clawing their way up the walls, jumping from one beam to the other, spitting, yowling and letting out the most blood curdling shrieks imaginable.

The last time I visited C... he was raising house cats on a large scale. I had not heard of his new venture but, although I fully expected to find something unusual in his household, I was not exactly prepared for what I saw. Half a mile before reaching his home I knew something was up. I could smell it; but when the shack came into sight, I had to stop to believe my eyes.

C... was walking back from his fishing hole in the ice of the lake. He was carrying a heavy bag of fish on his shoulder and was followed by 300 cats of all sizes, color and description.

They were marching behind him in mixed formation, picking their way daintily in the snow and carrying their tails straight up in the air. Their fur was long and silky but they had no ears to speak of, for the tips, frostbitten time and again, had shrivelled off, giving their heads an uncanny, bullet-like, appearance.

But what impressed me the most, in the dead calm of that January evening, was the sound of their voices. It was dinner time and the fact seemed to fill each cat with intense joy, for the 300 of them were singing a chorus, a peculiar throaty sing-song which they kept up without a break during the whole procession, from the fishing hole to the door step where eventually C... fed them carefully one by one.