"What is it?" repeated Sam.
"Don't know. Too stubby for a Muskrat, too much claw for a Cat, too small for a Coon, too many toes for a Mink."
[274] "I'll bet it's a Whangerdoodle."
Yan merely chuckled in answer to this.
"Don't you laugh," said the Woodpecker, solemnly, "You'd be more apt to cry if you seen one walk into the teepee blowing the whistle at the end of his tail. Then it'd be, 'Oh, Sam, where's the axe?'"
"Tell you what I do believe it is," said Yan, not noticing this terrifying description; "it's a Skunk."
"Little Beaver, my son! I thought I would tell you, then I sez to meself, 'No; it's better for him to find out by his lone. Nothing like a struggle in early life to develop the stuff in a man. It don't do to help him too much,' sez I, an' so I didn't."
Here Sam condescendingly patted the Second War Chief on the head and nodded approvingly. Of course he did not know as much about the track as Yan did, but he prattled on:
"Little Beaver! you're a heap struck on tracks—Ugh—good! You kin tell by them everything that passes in the night. Wagh! Bully! You're likely to be the naturalist of our Tribe. But you ain't got gumption. Now, in this yer hunting-ground of our Tribe there is only one place where you can see a track, an' that is that same mud-bank; all the rest is hard or grassy. Now, what I'd do if I was a Track-a-mist, I'd give the critters lots o' chance to leave tracks. I'd fix it all round with places so nothing could come or go 'thout givin' us his impressions of the trip. I'd have one on each end of the trail coming in, an' one on each side of the creek where it comes in an' goes out."
[275] "Well, Sam, you have a pretty level head. I wonder I didn't think of that myself."