Prairie Red-fox 729 



latter is as alert as the Fox, and has the advantage of awaiting 

 approach. Usually it gets into the brush, where the hunter 

 must give up the hunt. 



In following the trail of a hunting Fox once, I saw where he 

 had dug out a torpid garter-snake, bitten it nearly in two, and 

 left it lying on the snow, intending, it seemed, to come back for 

 it if he found nothing better. 



But, farther on, the track recorded how the prowler had 

 scented two prairie-chickens asleep in a drift of soft snow, had 

 stalked them with nose worthy of a pointer and step worthy of 

 a cat, had come just above them before they awoke to their 

 danger, and when they burst out of the drift he had sprung 

 and secured the nearest. Having now abundance of this finest 

 food, he was not compelled to go back for the cold snake, which 

 is never good eating, and on a cold day would have been a 

 very cold lunch indeed. 



When satisfied or tired, he lies down for a nap, not usually 

 in a hollow, but on some exposed place, the top of a bank, a 

 boulder, a log, or a stump. Here he curls up in a ball, his 

 blanket is on his back, and his travelling rug is his tail, his big 

 black ears, sticking a little above his tail, are the only things 

 that break the rounded yellow of the ball. 



He looks like a yellow stone, and seems to know it. Once 

 while travelling on the Souris in 1882, my brother and myself 

 noticed a yellow boulder, among others, on a ridge. He said: 

 "Look at that; doesn't it look like a Fox ?" I said: "No, I see 

 nothing but a yellow boulder." We marched within thirty 

 paces, ourselves, our wagon, and oxen. When twenty yards 

 past, a puff of wind seemed to cause a crack in the boulder. 

 My brother stopped and said: "I'm sure that's no boulder; it 

 looks to me like a Fox." He turned aside, took one step 

 towards it, and at once the Fox sprang up and ran for dear life. 

 He skurried across a stretch of burnt black prairie, then, reach- 

 ing a bit of unburnt yellow grass three hundred yards away, 

 crouched down in this and watched us again, not, I suspect, 

 because he knew the grass to be a good match with his own 

 colour, but simply because it was cover. 



