CHAPTER XVIII 



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 

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