266 THE STORY OF THE TRAPPER 



ing feet, or hanging spectrally on the dim frosty hori 

 zon all night long. Hunger drives them on; but they 

 seem to lack the courage to attack. I know of one case 

 where the wolves followed the dog trains bringing out 

 a trader s family from the North down the river-bed 

 for nearly five hundred miles. What man hunter would 

 follow so far? 



The farther north the fox hunter goes, the shorter 

 grow the days, till at last the sun, which has rolled 

 across the south in a wheel of fire, dwindles to a disk, 

 the disk to a rim then no rim at all comes up, and it 

 is midwinter night, night but not darkness. The white of 

 endless unbroken snow, the glint of icy particles filling 

 the air, the starlight brilliant as diamond points, the 

 Aurora Borealis in curtains and shafts and billows of 

 tenuous impalpable rose-coloured fire all brighten the 

 polar night so that the sun is unmissed. This is the 

 region chiefly hunted by the Eskimo, with a few white 

 men and Chippewyan half-breeds. The regular North 

 ern hunters do not go as far as the Arctics, but choose 

 their hunting-ground somewhere in the region of 

 &quot; little sticks,&quot; meaning the land where timber growth 

 is succeeded by dwarf scrubs. 



The hunting-ground is chosen always from the signs 

 written across the white page of the snow. If there 

 are claw-marks, bird signs of Northern grouse or white 

 ptarmigan or snow-bunting, ermine will be plentiful; 

 for the Northern birds with their clogged stockings of 

 feet feathers have a habit of floundering under the 

 powdery snow; and up through that powdery snow 

 darts the snaky neck of stoat, the white weasel -hunter 

 of birds. If there are the deep plunges of the white 

 hare, lynx and fox and mink and marten and pekan 



