American Polar Hare 



scattered over the back in summer and the ears and face 

 slightly gray (the allied polar hares of Labrador and New- 

 foundland are subject to a greater change. See below). 

 Range. Northern Baffin Land and the Arctic Islands of North 

 America. 



The polar hares are the Arctic explorers ot the great race 

 of hares and jack-rabbits, who, finding the climate and con- 

 ditions up there at the top of the world well suited to 

 their tastes, have established themselves, and continue to raise 

 their families and live happily in that wide ice-sheeted country far 

 away from the sun, wearing their coats of winter white from 

 year's end to year's end. 



A little farther south the hares put on their brown fur for a 

 few months in midsummer, and in most parts of Canada are 

 six months wnite and six months brown. The typical polar 

 hare of the Arctic region is a creature of the snow, depending 

 on it for protection against the weather and all other enemies. 

 Its home is a hole dug in a snow drift, or a cranny beneath 

 some outcropping ledge, and its food stone-worts and lichens 

 and the twigs of dwarfed alpine plants as hardy as itself. 



In the long dim-lighted winter, at the extreme north, it 

 probably has few enemies to fear, except the little blue fox ; and 

 in the few weeks of so-called summer the gyrfalcons and the 

 Arctic owls. But the gray-wolf and the wolverine and the Canada 

 lynx have little fear of the cold and follow the polar hare well 

 up within the Arctic circle. 



When it is not looking for its scanty fare of herbage the 

 polar hare sits crouching in its form, careless of the dry drifting 

 snow which often completely buries it while it sleeps. If the 

 gyrfalcon or the snowy owl should swing up in sight against 

 the dark sky, it only hugs the snow the closer trusting to remain 

 unseen; and when the Arctic fox comes prowling along the trail, 

 the hare is ready for a run with him across miles of unbroken 

 snow, just as eager to escape and go on living, as if there were 

 long summers amid green fields to look forward to. It is a little 

 curious that a member of the most thin-skinned and generally in- 

 capable race of mammals should be the one to prove itself best 

 able to withstand the hardship of an Arctic life; yet these polar 

 hares have been found living on ice fields over frozen seas twentj 

 miles from the nearest land. 



