584 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



never known any one who preferred the small calves, but the year- 

 lings are commonly considered best. There would be no advantage 

 in letting the calves escape, for without the herd they would be 

 killed by wolves. 



It is curious that even zoologists have fallen into the notion 

 that ovibos live on lichens and mosses. Apparently this follows 

 the assumption that there is little polar vegetation except crypto- 

 gams. Any good anatomist should be able to tell by a glance at 

 the mouth of an ovibos that he is a grass-eater. Most lichens, in- 

 cluding the so-called caribou moss, are shrinking plants that are 

 easily picked up only by animals with prehensile lips, such as 

 sheep or reindeer. A cow has a clumsy mouth not adapted to 

 picking up small things and gets the grass into her mouth by stick- 

 ing out her tongue and using it as a hook to pull it in. So do 

 polar cattle. 



Ovibos live on grass and other phanerogams, a fact which 

 should be well known but is not, for zoologists persist in assuming 

 that their bones found in southerly countries prove that there must 

 have been in those parts a contemporary vegetation abounding in 

 cryptogams. And the curators of highly respected zoological mu- 

 seums mount ovibos realistically in glass cases to show school chil- 

 dren and others how they scratch lichens for food from underneath 

 the snow. These are probably the only ovibos who ever had their 

 mouths full of lichens. Still, cattle and horses will eat strange 

 things when put to it, and it is not impossible that a herd might 

 stray into a neighborhood where no other food is available, and 

 while they could not pick it directly off the ground as caribou can, 

 they could, of course, always scratch it up and eat it off the snow. 



When hunting ovibos in winter we frequently see quantities of 

 moss and lichens scattered over the snow where they have been 

 feeding. But the things a man leaves on his plate are not neces- 

 sarily identical with those he has eaten. To find out what ovibos 

 eat you must either observe them extremely near or else cut open 

 their paunches. The first we have never done, but of paunches 

 we have opened several hundreds. These have always contained 

 prevailingly phanerogams with no more moss or lichens than you 

 would expect to find mixed with the grass when it is pulled up. 

 But Storkerson tells me that he has opened paunches where moss 

 formed a high proportion — not caribou moss, which is a lichen, but 

 various real mosses.* 



* A friend who has read the proofs of this book wants me to put in here a 

 footnote saying there is grass in winter on the polar lands. I had not thought 



