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foxes, whenever they find them on the open plains, at a distance from 

 their underground dens. A large wolf is strong enough to carry off an 

 arctic fox in his mouth at a rate of speed far surpassing that of hunters 

 upon snowshoes. They are said frequently to attack and carry off the 

 sleigh dogs of the Indians. 



The northern Indians improve the breed of their sleigh dogs by 

 crossing them with wolves. This process adds to their size, speed and 

 strength. The voice of the wolf and that of the Indian dog, to my own 

 personal knowledge, in volume and sound, is precisely similar. 



Many years ago I remember having hunted deer with a large sized 

 Indian dog. He was one of the best dogs that I ever turned loose 

 upon a deer track. As he pursued his quarry his tongue was distinctly 

 and unmistakably the howl of of a wolf, loud, clear and prolonged, 

 without a single sharp hark like that of a dog. This dog, true to the 

 instincts of his ancestry, never failed to find a deer, if there was one 

 within reach, and once the game was found, he stuck to the trail like 

 his old progenitors until he tasted blood. I would not mind paying 

 what some of my audience would consider an exorbitant price for such 

 another dog to-day. 



When I speak of Indian dogs, I do not mean the miserable dimin- 

 utive race of singed curs generally found in starving annoyance around 

 an Indian camp to-day. Such attenuated whelps, in my opinion, can 

 trace their origin to the fox ; certainly not to the wolf. I allude to the 

 strong and hardy wolf dogs used by the Indians in the Northwest, and 

 by the Esquimaux as they speed along over the snow under the crack- 

 ling of the aurora borealis in the Arctic Circle. 



The late Sheriff Dickson, of Pakenham, who, during many years of 

 his life was, not only a successful deer hunter, but also an enthusiastic 

 student of geology, in an interesting article on the wolf, published in the 

 Canadian Naturalist and Geologist, gives many entertaining particulars 

 respecting the Canadian wolf. From personal experience he bears tes- 

 timony to the cowardice and treachery of wolves. When caught in a 

 trap, wounded by a gunshot, or cornered up so that they could not escape 

 he invariably killed them with a club or tomahawk, without ever meet- 

 ing with any^resistance. Wolves, he found, could always be frightened 

 away from the carcass of a deer by firing a shot amongst them. 



