The prow of the canoe swerved with a telling movement that sent my eyes quick to the shore, to see a snow-shoe rabbit racing down a little cove hard at me, with something--a stir of alder leaves, a sound of long, leaping feet making off into the swamp--that had been pursuing him. It was probably a wildcat that had leaped and missed the rabbit and seen us from within his covert. What lightning eyes and lightning legs, thus to leap and turn together! The rabbit had run almost to the canoe, and sat listening from behind a root at the edge of the water, ears straight up and body so tense with excitement that we nosed along close enough to touch him with a paddle before he had eyes and ears for us. Even then it was his twitching, sensitive nose that warned him, for his keen ears caught no sound; and, floating down upon him thus, we must have looked to his innocent eyes as much like a log or a two-headed moose as like men. Softly in and out with the narrow fret of shadow that hemmed the margin of the pond swam the gray canoe, a creature of the water, a very part of our creature selves, our amphibious body, the form we swam with before the hills were born. Brother to the muskrat and the beaver, I stemmed along, as much at home as they among the pickerel-weed and the cow-lilies, and leaving across the silvery patches of the open water as silent a wake as they. Nothing could move across such silvery quiet without a trail. So stirless was the water that the wake of a feeding fish was visible a hundred yards away. Within the tarnished smooches of the lily-pads a muskrat might move about and not be seen; but not a trout could swirl close to the burnished surface of the open water without a ripple that ran whispering into every little inlet around the shore. The circle of the pond was almost perfect, so that I roved, at a glance, the whole curving shore-line, watching keenly for whatever might come down to feed or drink.