The two sat there, the man half-kneeling on the low bed, and stroking
the fur very gently. It could scarcely be thought that such pride should
be spent on a little pelt, by a mere backwoodsman and his nine-year-old
son. One has seen a woman fingering a splendid necklace, her eyes
fascinated by the bunch of warm, deep jewels--a light not of mere
vanity, or hunger, or avarice in her face--only the love of the
beautiful thing. But this was an animal's skin. Did they feel the
animal underneath it yet, giving it beauty, life, glory?
The silver-fox skin is the prize of the north, and this one was of the
boy's own harvesting. While his father was away he saw the fox creeping
by the hut. The joy of the hunter seized him, and guided his eye over
the sights of his father's rifle as he rested the barrel on the
windowsill, and the animal was his! Now his finger ran into the hole
made by the bullet, and he gave a little laugh of modest triumph.
Minutes passed as they studied, felt, and admired the skin, the hunter
proud of his son, the son alive with a primitive passion, which inflicts
suffering to get the beautiful thing. Perhaps the tenderness as well as
the wild passion of the animal gets into the hunter's blood, and tips
his fingers at times with an exquisite kindness--as one has noted in a
lion fondling her young, or in tigers as they sport upon the sands of
the desert. This boy had seen his father shoot a splendid moose, and, as
it lay dying, drop down and kiss it in the neck for sheer love of its
handsomeness.
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