SECOND SERIES BOSTON, U.S.A. GINN & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS The Athenæum Press 1900 TO KILLOOLEET, Little Sweet-Voice, who shares my camp and makes sunshine as I work and play....

The following sketches, like the "Ways of Wood Folk", are the result of many years of personal observation in the woods and fields. They are studies of animals, pure and simple, not of animals with human motives and imaginations. Indeed, it is hardly necessary for genuine interest to give human traits to the beasts. Any animal is interesting enough as an animal, and has character enough of his own, without borrowing anything from man—as one may easily find out by watching long enough. Most wild

Megaleep is the big woodland caribou of the northern wilderness. His Milicete name means The Wandering One, but it ought to mean the Mysterious and the Changeful as well. If you hear that he is bold and fearless, that is true; and if you are told that he is shy and wary and inapproachable, that is also true. For he is never the same two days in succession. At once shy and bold, solitary and gregarious; restless as a cloud, yet clinging to his feeding grounds, spite of wolves and hunters, till he

The day was cold, the woods were wet, and the weather was beastly altogether when Killooleet first came and sang on my ridgepole. The fishing was poor down in the big lake, and there were signs of civilization here and there, in the shape of settlers' cabins, which we did not like; so we had pushed up river, Simmo and I, thirty miles in the rain, to a favorite camping ground on a smaller lake, where we had the wilderness all to ourselves. The rain was still falling, and the lake white-capped, an

This is the story of one day, the last one, in the life of Kagax the Weasel, who turns white in winter, and yellow in spring, and brown in summer, the better to hide his villainy. It was early twilight when Kagax came out of his den in the rocks, under the old pine that lightning had blasted. Day and night were meeting swiftly but warily, as they always meet in the woods. The life of the sunshine came stealing nestwards and denwards in the peace of a long day and a full stomach; the night life b

Kookooskoos is the big brown owl, the Bubo Virginianus , or Great Horned Owl of the books. But his Indian name is best. Almost any night in autumn, if you leave the town and go out towards the big woods, you can hear him calling it, Koo-koo-skoos, koooo, kooo , down in the swamp. Kookooskoos is always catching the wrong rat. The reason is that he is a great hunter, and thinks that every furry thing which moves must be game; and so he is like the fool sportsman who shoots at a sound, or a motion

I was watching for a bear one day by an alder point, when Chigwooltz came swimming in from the lily pads in great curiosity to see what I was doing under the alders. He was an enormous frog, dull green with a yellowish vest—which showed that he was a male—but with the most brilliant ear drums I had ever seen. They fairly glowed with iridescent color, each in its ring of bright yellow. When I tried to catch him (very quietly, for the bear was somewhere just above on the ridge) in order to examine

"Here he is again! here's Old Whitehead, robbing the fish-hawk." I started up from the little commoosie beyond the fire, at Gillie's excited cry, and ran to join him on the shore. A glance out over Caribou Point to the big bay, where innumerable whitefish were shoaling, showed me another chapter in a long but always interesting story. Ismaquehs, the fish-hawk, had risen from the lake with a big fish, and was doing his best to get away to his nest, where his young ones were clamoring. Over him so

"Long 'go, O long time 'go," so says Simmo the Indian, Upweekis the lynx came to Clote Scarpe one day with a complaint. "See," he said, "you are good to everybody but me. Pekquam the fisher is cunning and patient; he can catch what he will. Lhoks the panther is strong and tireless; nothing can get away from him, not even the great moose. And Mooween the bear sleeps all winter, when game is scarce, and in summer eats everything,—roots and mice and berries and dead fish and meat and honey and red