UNDER THE NORTH STAR 323 



Dakota a dirty little weasel noted for killing forty chickens in a 

 night, wearing a mahogany-colored coat with a sulphur strip 

 down his throat, while the ermine of the Arctic is as white as snow, 

 noted for his courage, wearing a spotless coat which kings envy, 

 yes, and take from him ? For a long time the learned men who 

 study animal life from museums held that the ermine's coat 

 turned white from the same cause as human hair, from senility and 

 debility and the depleting effect of an intensely trying climate. 

 But the trappers told a different story. They told of baby ermine 

 born in Arctic burrows, in March, April, May, June, while the 

 mother was still in white coat, babies born in an ashy coat some- 

 thing like a mouse-skin that turned to fleecy white within ten days. 

 They told of ermine shedding his brown coat in autumn to display a 

 fresh layer of iron-gray fur that turned sulphur white within a few 

 days. They told of the youngest and smallest and strongest ermine 

 with the softest and whitest coats. That disposed of the senility 

 theory. All the trapper knows is that the whitest ermine is taken 

 when the cold is most intense and most continuous, that just as 

 the cold slackens the ermine coat assumes the sulphur tinges, deepen- 

 ing to russet and brown, and that the, whitest ermine instead of 

 showing senility, always displays the most active and courageous 

 sort of deviltry. 



Summer or winter, the northern trapper is constantly surrounded 

 by ermine and signs of ermine. There are the tiny claw-tracks 

 almost like frost tracery across the snow. There is the rifled nest 

 of a poor grouse — eggs sucked, or chickens murdered, the nest 

 fouled so that it emits the stench of a skunk, or the mother hen 

 lying dead from a wound in her throat. There is the frightened 

 rabbit loping across the fields in the wildest, wobbliest, most woe- 

 begone leaps, trying to shake something off that is clinging to his 

 throat till over he tumbles — the prey of a hunter that is barely 

 the size of rabbit's paw. There is the water-rat flitting across the 

 rocks in blind terror, regardless of the watching trapper, caring 

 only to reach safety — water — water ! Behind comes the pursuer 



