in the books—so as to kill the marten, but without injuring his skin, as he gets inside. The wolverine comes to one of these little wigwams, and knows exactly what it means. There is something inside to be got, and a door to walk in by. That something he means to have, but he is not going in by the door. He knows what would happen if he did. That is one of man’s horrible treacheries—pretending to be kind and nice to animals, but meaning to destroy them all the while. It is a trap, and the way to get the better of a trap is never to do what it asks you to do, or, at least, not in the way that it asks you to do it. So, being asked to go in by the door, the wolverine pulls out some of the poles at the other end, and goes in that way, taking the bait from behind. Having done this, he generally proceeds to show his contempt of the whole thing, and especially, perhaps, of the man who thought he could take him in, by destroying the trap _in toto_, scattering the poles all about, and then going off to do the same with the next. In this way the whole line of traps are treated one after another, and if a marten has been caught in any of them, the wolverine eats as much as he wants and hides the rest—for he is very fond of taking things away and hiding them. One may imagine the rage of the trapper when he comes back to look at his traps. Either he must get rid of the wolverine in some way, or leave that part of the country altogether. To lie in wait with a gun, himself, would be a tedious business, and the chances are that the wolverine would either smell him or find out his whereabouts in some other way, and so take care not to come near. He determines to trap him, or at least to try to. Half a dozen traps of different sorts—acting upon different principles of destruction—he makes himself, with all the skill and ingenuity that his own cunning, sharpened by a lifelong experience, can suggest, and he sets several steel ones as well. Every three or four days he comes to look at them, but always, if the wolverine has been there at all, he finds one of two things. Either the baits have been taken and the traps pulled to pieces, or else both trap and bait have been left severely alone. In this latter case the cunning animal has feared to touch them. There are his tracks all about, and in some places the marks of his body, where he has lain down and gazed intently at the things he was trying to understand. But he was not quite satisfied, had not entirely grasped the principle, not penetrated as deeply into the matter as, under the circumstances, he would like to do. Therefore he would not touch it. Until he saw clearly just what the idea was, the trapper must really excuse him: he would much rather leave it alone. As soon as he had discovered it, he might be relied upon—the bait was most attractive—but until then he preferred to go on with the marten-traps. They were quite simple: no difficulty at all about them.