I have met in the wilderness several white men whose hobby was to raise
strange pets, either for their own pleasure or to add a little to what
ever income they derived from the country they lived in. But old C...
was the star of them all.
During all the years I have known him, I have never seen him once
without some peculiar animal at his door step.
First it was a bear. The brute was full grown and tied to a tree by a
chain. It allowed his master to stroke him but was dangerous to anyone
else. It had made friends with a little Indian dog and used to sleep
with the pup clasped between its front paws. After that, it was a family
of skunks—a mother and five young ones. They were as tame as cats and
roamed in and out of the shack at their own free will. It was a good
thing that the neighbors were few and far between for, if the wood
pussies did not pay the slightest attention to C..., on the other hand
they resented bitterly the presence of any stranger on the premises.
[Illustration: A bear in a tree.]
Later on, my friend tried his hand at wild lynx. There had been a great
migration of those animals that summer and he was able to lasso eighteen
as they swam across the lakes and rivers in the neighborhood.
He put the whole lot in an old bunk house near his shack and used to
feed them once a day on fish. It was a great sight. The old man would
enter most unconcernedly while the eighteen lynx hurled themselves from
one end of the bunk house to the other, clawing their way up the walls,
jumping from one beam to the other, spitting, yowling and letting out
the most blood curdling shrieks imaginable.
The last time I visited C... he was raising house cats on a large scale.
I had not heard of his new venture but, although I fully expected to
find something unusual in his household, I was not exactly prepared for
what I saw. Half a mile before reaching his home I knew something was
up. I could smell it; but when the shack came into sight, I had to stop
to believe my eyes.
C... was walking back from his fishing hole in the ice of the lake. He
was carrying a heavy bag of fish on his shoulder and was followed by 300
cats of all sizes, color and description.
They were marching behind him in mixed formation, picking their way
daintily in the snow and carrying their tails straight up in the air.
Their fur was long and silky but they had no ears to speak of, for the
tips, frostbitten time and again, had shrivelled off, giving their heads
an uncanny, bullet-like, appearance.
But what impressed me the most, in the dead calm of that January
evening, was the sound of their voices. It was dinner time and the fact
seemed to fill each cat with intense joy, for the 300 of them were
singing a chorus, a peculiar throaty sing-song which they kept up
without a break during the whole procession, from the fishing hole to
the door step where eventually C... fed them carefully one by one.