How Beautiful And Interesting They Are
Is About As Difficult For Busy Mortals To Find Out As If Their Homes
Were Beyond Sight In The Sky.
Hence the stories of every wild hunter
and trapper are eagerly listened to as being possibly true, or partly
so, however thickly clothed in successive folds of exaggeration and
fancy.
Unsatisfying as these accounts must be, a tourist's frightened
rush and scramble through the woods yields far less than the hunter's
wildest stories, while in writing we can do but little more than to
give a few names, as they come to mind, - beaver, squirrel, coon, fox,
marten, fisher, otter, ermine, wildcat, - only this instead of full
descriptions of the bright-eyed furry throng, their snug home nests,
their fears and fights and loves, how they get their food, rear their
young, escape their enemies, and keep themselves warm and well and
exquisitely clean through all the pitiless weather.
For many years before the settlement of the country the fur of the
beaver brought a high price, and therefore it was pursued with
weariless ardor. Not even in the quest for gold has a more ruthless,
desperate energy been developed. It was in those early beaver-days
that the striking class of adventurers called "free trappers" made
their appearance. Bold, enterprising men, eager to make money, and
inclined at the same time to relish the license of a savage life,
would set forth with a few traps and a gun and a hunting knife,
content at first to venture only a short distance up the beaver
streams nearest to the settlements, and where the Indians were not
likely to molest them.
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