ferreter

Anyone who’s won as many prizes and sold as many books as Atwood runs the risk of false modesty calling themselves “a mere scribbler … a ferreter into matters about which I don’t know very much.”

The description matched ferrets allegedly stolen from ferreter Ian Smith's garden days earlier.

During the last twenty years he has obtained a reputation for being the most persistent ferreter of news in existence; but in many minds there is distrust whenever, over his signature, some unexpected revelation comes to change the key in the European concert.

Great ferreter as he was, he had discovered former servants of the Duchess of Norfolk, that were ready, for consideration of threats, to swear that they had seen the Lady Katharine when a child in her grandmother's house to be over familiar with one Francis Dearham.

But Benjamin Dorn, experienced ferreter that he was, could not see two people of different sexes together without imagining that he was an accomplice in the hereditary sin of human kind.