Two Irishmen who trap muskrats on the Wabash, Dannie Macnoun and Jimmy Malone, have been friends since boyhood; Jimmy drinks and neglects his wife Mary, Dannie loves her and says nothing, and the old black bass in the river is the one prize both men want. Stratton-Porter waded into the Limberlost with a plate camera to photograph birds and wrote fiction to pay for it; this short novel is where her nature writing and her human story first fuse.