Jack the Young Trapper: An Eastern Boy's Fur Hunting in the Rocky Mountains

by George Bird Grinnell

Hugh had supper cooked and was sitting by the fire, smoking.

"Well, son," he said, "I didn't know but what maybe you had got lost. I see that you've been busy. What's that you've got—a piece of antelope meat and a lion?"

"That's what, Hugh," said Jack. "I tell you, I've had a great time this afternoon. A whole lot of fun, and a lion's skin."

"Well," said Hugh, "you surely have had a good time. I expect I'd have been glad to have gone with you if I had known you were going to see a lion. How did you get him?"

So, while they were eating supper, Jack told Hugh the story of the killing of the lion, and then talked with him at great length about the sights he had seen on the beaver pond.

"Yes," said Hugh, "there are sure lots of birds on all these ponds, and as we were saying only the other day, they breed here and nothing much disturbs them."

"But, Hugh," asked Jack, "why don't the wolves and the coyotes make it their business to hunt around these ponds and catch the old ducks and eat their eggs, too? I should think that a family of coyotes could easily enough clean out all the birds on a pond."

"Well," replied Hugh, "that's something that I've often thought about, and I don't know why they don't do it. Once in a long time, of course, you will find a duck's nest or a nest of a sage hen where the old bird has been caught and the eggs eaten, but that is something that you don't often see. I suppose, perhaps, one reason is that the birds are always on the lookout, and if they see or hear an animal they fly off, pretending to be injured, and the animal chases them, just as I remember I once saw you chase an old grouse that led you away from her young ones. Still, all I can say is that I don't know why it is that more nesting birds are not destroyed by wolves, coyotes, foxes, badgers, and skunks."

"Now, some of those nests that I found, nests that belonged, I think, to the grebes, were floating out in the water and a little way from the shore," said Jack. "I can understand how they would be safe, because an animal would have to go through deep mud and water to get them; but why the ducks' nests, that are built on the shore, and often up on the high land and at a little distance from the water, are not all of them robbed by these animals, I don't see."