clams onto his dining table, and sat down in the midst to enjoy the feast.  He would take a clam in his fore paws, whack it a few times on the rock till the shell cracked, then open it with his teeth and devour the morsel inside.  He ate leisurely, tasting each clam critically before swallowing, and sitting up often to wash his whiskers or to look out over the lake.  A hermit thrush sang marvelously sweet above him; the twilight colors glowed deep and deeper in the water below, where his shadow was clearly eating clams also, in the midst of heaven’s splendor.—­Altogether a pretty scene, and a moment of peace that I still love to remember.  I quite forgot that Musquash is a villain.  But the tragedy was near, as it always is in the wilderness.  Suddenly a movement caught my eye on the bank above.  Something was waving nervously under the bushes.  Before I could make out what it was, there was a fearful rush, a gleam of wild yellow eyes, a squeak from the muskrat.  Then Upweekis, looking gaunt and dark and strange in his summer coat, was crouched on the rock with Musquash between his great paws, growling fiercely as he cracked the bones.  He bit his game all over, to make sure that it was quite dead, then took it by the back of the neck, glided into the bushes with his stub tail twitching, and became a shadow again.

Another time I was perched up in a lodged tree, some twenty feet from the ground, watching a big bait of fish which I had put in an open spot for anything that might choose to come and get it.  I was hoping for a bear, and so climbed above the ground that he might not get my scent should he come from leeward.  It was early autumn, and my intentions were wholly peaceable.  I had no weapon of any kind.

Late in the afternoon something took to chasing a red squirrel near me.  I heard them scurrying through the trees, but could see nothing.  The chase passed out of hearing, and I had almost forgotten it, for something was moving in the underbrush near my bait, when back it came with a rush.  The squirrel, half dead with fright, leaped from a spruce-tip to the ground, jumped onto the tree in which I sat, and raced up the incline, almost to my feet, where he sprang to a branch and sat chattering hysterically between two fears.  After him came a pine marten, following swiftly, catching the scent of his game, not from the bark or the ground, but apparently from the air.  Scarcely had he jumped upon my tree when there was a screech and a rush in the underbrush just below him, and out of the bushes came a young lynx to join in the chase.  He missed the marten on the ground, but sprang to my tree like a flash.  I remember still that the only sound I was conscious of at the time was the ripping of his nails in the dead bark.  He had been seeking my bait undoubtedly—­for it was a good lynx country, and Upweekis loves fish like a cat—­when the chase passed under his nose and he joined it on the instant.

Halfway up the incline the marten smelled me, or was terrified by the noise behind him and leaped aside.  A branch upon which I was leaning swayed or snapped, and the lucivee stopped as if struck, crouching lower and lower against the tree, his big yellow expressionless eyes glaring straight into mine.  A moment only he stood the steady look; then his eyes wavered; he turned his head, leaped for the underbrush, and was gone.