CHAPTER X 

 UNDER THE NORTH STAR — WHERE FOX AND ERMINE RUN 



Of Foxes, Many and Various — Red, Cross, Silver, Black, 

 Prairie, Kit or Swift, Arctic, Blue, and Gray 



Wherever grouse and rabbit abound, there will foxes run and 

 there will the hunter set steel-traps. But however beautiful a 

 fox-skin may be as a specimen, it has value as a fur only when it 

 belongs to one of three varieties — Arctic, black, and silver. Other 

 foxes — red, cross, prairie, swift, and gray — the trapper will take 

 when they cross his path and sell them in the gross at the fur post, 

 as he used to barter buffalo-hides. But the hunter who traps the 

 fox for its own sake, and not as an uncalculated extra to the mink- 

 hunt or the beaver total, must go to the Far North, to the land of 

 winter night and midnight sun, to obtain the best fox-skins. 



It matters not to the trapper that the little kit fox or swift at run 

 among the hills between the Missouri and Saskatchewan is the most 

 shapely of all the fox kind, with as finely pointed a nose as a spitz 

 dog, ears alert as a terrier's, and a brush, more like a lady's gray 

 feather boa than fur, curled round his dainty toes. Little kit's 

 fur is a grizzled gray shading to mottled fawn. The hairs are 

 coarse, horsey, indistinctly marked, and the fur is of small value 

 to the trader; so dainty little swift, who looks as if nature made 

 him for a pet dog instead of a fox, is slighted by the hunter, unless 

 kit persists in tempting a trap. Rufus the red fellow, with his 

 grizzled gray head and black ears and whitish throat and flaunting 



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