THE MUSKRAT

A little turning of nature from her own courses banishes the beaver from his primal haunts, but his less renowned and lesser cousin, the muskrat, philosophically accommodates himself to the changed conditions of their common foster mother and still clings fondly to her altered breast.

The ancient forests may be swept away and their successors disappear, till there is scarcely left him a watersoaked log to use as an intermediate port in his coastwise voyages; continual shadow may give place to diurnal sunshine, woodland to meadow and pasture, the plough tear the roof of his underground home, and cattle graze where once only the cloven hoofs of the deer and the moose trod the virgin mould, yet he holds his old place.

In the springtides of present years as in those of centuries past his whining call echoes along the changed shores, his wake seams with silver the dark garment of the water, and his comically grim visage confronts you now as it did the Waubanakee bowmen in the old days when the otter and the beaver were his familiars.

Unlike the beaver's slowly maturing crops, his food supply is constantly provided in the annual growth of the marshes. Here in banks contiguous to endless store of succulent sedge and lily roots and shell-cased tidbits of mussels, he tunnels his stable water-portaled home, and out there, by the channel's edge, builds his sedge-thatched hut before the earliest frost falls upon the marshes. In its height, some find prophecy of high or low water, and in the thickness of its walls the forecast of a mild or severe winter, but the prophet himself is sometimes flooded out of his house, sometimes starved and frozen in it.

In the still, sunny days between the nights of its unseen building, the blue spikes of the pickerel-weed and the white trinities of the arrow-head yet bloom beside it. Then in the golden and scarlet brightness of autumn the departing wood drake rests on the roof to preen his plumage, and later the dusky duck swims on its watery lawn. Above it the wild geese harrow the low, cold arch of the sky, the last fleet of sere leaves drifts past it in the bleak wind, and then ice and snow draw the veil of the long winter twilight over the muskrat's homes and haunts.

These may be gloomy days he spends groping in the dark chambers of his hut and burrow, or gathering food in the dimly lighted icy water, with never a sight of the upper world nor ever a sunbeam to warm him.

But there are more woful days when the sun and the sky are again opened to him, and he breathes the warm air of spring, hears the blackbirds sing and the bittern boom. For, amid all the gladness of nature's reawakened life, danger lurks in all his paths; the cruel, hungry trap gapes for him on every jutting log, on every feeding-bed, even in the doorway of his burrow and by the side of his house.

The trapper's skiff invades all his pleasant waters; on every hand he hears the splash of its paddles, the clank of its setting pole, and he can scarcely show his head above water but a deadly shower of lead bursts upon it. He hears the simulated call of his beloved, and voyaging hot-hearted to the cheating tryst meets only death.

At last comes the summer truce and happy days of peace in the tangled jungle of the marsh, with the wild duck and bittern nesting beside his watery path, the marsh wren weaving her rushy bower above it.

So the days of his life go on, and the days of his race continue in the land of his unnumbered generations. Long may he endure to enliven the drear tameness of civilization with a memory of the world's old wildness.