Often two visits were made in the morning, one just at the screech of day, and the last one after he had had his breakfast. Traps were taken up at this first visit to be set in some other locality that afternoon, and the hunter would paddle away for his lodge, where he would sleep all the forenoon while his wife and children were skinning and stretching the pelts. The next and every night would be spent in the same way until the ice took, and then another mode of sport I wish to describe would take place. Ice in one night on these shallow waters was sufficiently strong to support the weight of one man. Armed with a long barbed spear a couple of feet in length, lashed to a stout pole, a bag on his back to put the rats in, and sometimes followed by a boy at a distance, the Indian, with his bright steel skates firmly buckled on, would glide down and in and out these skate lanes looking for rat houses. Practice and experience taught him to get over the ice in the least noisy way. Instead of striking out one foot after the other, he skated as the people of Holland do by a motion of the hips. It is not a graceful way, but it is easy on the skater of long distances on new glare ice. Sliding, as it were, down to one of the mud cones with spear firmly grasped, he would drive it down into the center, and very rarely missed transfixing one and at times two of the highly perfumed little animals. The interior of a rat house is a saucer-like hollow in the center, just a little above the level of the water. From the edge of this there may be three or four slideways into deep water. At the least alarm the rats tumble down these in a minute and only return when all danger is past. When the inhabitants of a single house number eight, ten or twelve and they huddle together for warmth, they are often one on top of another, and thus the spear passes thru two at one thrust. The yet unfrozen mud is torn away and the spear with the rats lifted out, dispatched and placed in the bag, and the hunter bears down to another house and so on thru the day. When the bag becomes too heavy it is emptied out on the ice and the hunt continued. Towards night the Indian retraces his road and picks up the piles he left earlier in the day. His leather bag is converted into a sled, the ends of his long waisted sash are tied to the bag, and with the loop over his shoulder he strikes out a road straight for his camp, well pleased with his day's sport and himself. Knowledge of the architecture of the musquash's house (for they are all modeled in the same way) enables a bush man to know just where the little family are huddled.