224 EXTINCT AND VANISHING MAMMALS 



or the fox formed any part of the prey. In his account of the 

 mammals observed by the Denmark Expedition to East 

 Greenland, during which the ship of the expedition wintered 

 near Hvalrossodden, he states that the party found evidence 

 of wolves between latitudes 75 and 83 10' N. He believes 

 that they have been derived from the North American regions 

 by way of northern Greenland. At all events they are few in 

 number and, curiously, seemed very wary, though one would 

 have expected the contrary from their very slight contact with 

 man. In the last of August, 1906, he saw a large white wolf 

 and at length succeeded in shooting it by lying in ambush 

 wrapped in the skin of a muskox he had killed, the meat of 

 which served as bait. This female was in excellent condition, 

 "almost fat," and weighed 35 kilograms. Its total length was 

 about 1500 mm.; tail, 420; ear, 100 long by 100 wide. Two 

 others were seen and tracks were found among the mountains 

 inland from Hvalrossodden and slightly to the west and north. 

 During the winter of 1906-7, while the expedition was frozen 

 in near this place, a group of three Arctic wolves came about 

 the ship from time to time, but were very wary, and in the dim 

 polar night offered no good chance for a shot. Several sledge 

 dogs were once set upon them, but they were driven back by 

 the wolves, which eventually succeeded in killing four of their 

 animals and wounding others. If a sledge journey were made 

 to the meteorological station or elsewhere in the neighborhood 

 one or more of the wolves would follow at a distance, but even- 

 tually they became bolder, so that by the end of the winter all 

 three had been shot or trapped. Of these the largest was a 

 male weighing 29 kilograms, very thin and emaciated. 



It thus appears that the Greenland wolf at the present time 

 is confined to the narrow strip of country between the inland 

 ice and the sea from northern Greenland to about the region of 

 Scoresby Sound, following the muskox. That in former times 

 it ranged much farther south can hardly be doubted, and it 

 probably followed the caribou now largely extinct in Greenland. 

 It seems probable that the wolf, like the lemming and the 

 muskox, spread across northern Greenland and down the east 

 coast rather than the west coast, on account of the great ice 

 barriers in the region of Inglefield Gulf. The wolf seems to 

 have been gone from southern and western Greenland long ago, 

 though mentioned by early historians. Even Egede's "De- 



