682 



Life-histories of Northern Animals 



these are the family of the year, still with the mother and 

 occasionally accompanied also by the father. George Link- 

 later assures me that he has often seen in the snow signs of 

 Lynxes gathered together to chase each other and play, at a 

 time when sex instincts were out of the question. But what 

 the nature of the game was I have failed to learn. E. W. 

 Nelson says:'^ "The fur-traders and Indians of the Upper 

 Yukon claim that the Lynxes sometimes unite in parties of 

 5 or 6 and make Rabbit drives on the small islands in the 

 Yukon. They claim to have heard the Lynxes utter a sharp 

 whistling noise, and to have found their tracks in the snow 

 where the line had swept the island, until each secured its prey, 

 near the farther end." 



INTER- 

 COMMU- 

 NICA- 

 TION 



The stripes on the face, the black ear-tufts, the whiskers, 

 and the little nervous twitching black-tipped tail, are no doubt 

 important direction marks to help the Lynx's own kind in 

 recognizing it, but its voice is its chief means of communicating 

 with its distant fellows. I never heard a Lynx purr, but all 

 other sounds that a house-cat has, the Lynx has, and uses 

 them in much the same way. I know nothing of the 'whistling' 

 mentioned by Nelson in a previous paragraph. It has, how- 

 ever, another vocal effort which is even better developed than 

 in the cat, and that is a yowling song. This begins with a 

 long low ' me-ow,' followed by others in quick succession, with 

 rising pitch and volume, till after three or four minutes continu- 

 ous performance the final ' me-ows' are terrific screeches. I 

 have heard this in August, October, and December, and do not 

 know what it means, or which sex utters it. But the trappers 

 tell me that the somewhat similar and frightful caterwauling of 

 the males is mostly heard early in March and has a direct 

 relation to the mating. 



MATING The species is generally believed to pair, but I have no 



evidence beyond the opinion of hunters. 



The mating season is any time during the first half of 



' Nat. Hist. Alaska, 1887, p. 235. 



