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 of 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 
gyrfulcon 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 twenty 
miles from the nearest land. 
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