a family party of these great white mammals lounging about on 

 the surface, on their backs, with their heads sticking up inquir- 

 ingly and their huge forepaws languidly crossed on their chests. 

 The Arctic Fox or Snow Dog is a strange little creature. It is 

 not a true fox (Vulpesj but quite a different animal. Alopex, with 

 small, squarish ears, short, sharp muzzle, and narrow little body. 

 In winter these animals are pure white and clothed in a long 

 and beautiful fluffy fur; in summer they are scra^gly-looking 

 creatures with short maroon-brown coats and apparently out- 



Tlus curious crystalline substance is known as "weather 

 ice" and forms from repeated partial melting and re freezing 

 of snow. It breaks into candle-shaped sticks. 



sized feet. However, some of them, at one time of the year or 

 another, develop long, fluffy coats like the winter pelage but 

 colored like the summer one. This we know as a blue fox. The 

 Arctic Fox has a habit of collecting small mammals and birds in 

 late summer and fall, and stashing them away in caches be- 

 tween rocks or in cracks between land ice, as food for the long 

 period of total winter darkness. These animals appear, in fact, 

 to enjoy quite a good living, for not only do they have these 

 caches to supply them in emergencies, but they also find certain 

 lemmings that are active under the snow during that season. 

 They seem also to wander about all over the icecap and even 

 the ice raft itself, and feed on scraps left by the polar bears. 



The number of these animals in this province can hardly be 

 conceived, for they are found everywhere south to the tree line, 

 and they have been trapped by the thousands for two centuries 

 and form the basis of the northern fur trade. However, their 

 numbers wax and wane regularly over the years. This is depend- 

 ent upon the cyclical increase and decrease in the numbers of 

 the lemmings — small tailless rodents that we shall meet more 

 intimately in the next province. 



Other animals of the far north, too, vary in numbers accord- 

 ingly, notably the great Snowy Owls. As the lemmings diminish 

 in numbers, the carnivores do likewise, partly through starvation, 

 partly through decreased breeding, and partly through diseases that 

 then invariably strike them very hard. Only the owls partially 

 overcome their plight by flying south, sometimes in vast num- 

 bers and reaching as far as the northern United States. However, 

 it is a mysterious fact that all of these, too. die off very rapidly, 

 and never breed or become established in the south. Even in 

 captivity, snowy owls caught in the far north in peak lemming 

 years and brought south die in a few weeks, whereas identical 

 birds caught in lean years in the north may survive for years in 

 cages and be very hardy. 



The other birds of these northern lands and of the ice raft are 

 the huge, almost pure white Glaucous Gull, which has a pale 

 gray mantle but white wing tips, and the little pigeon-shaped 

 Ivory Gull, which is pristine white all over but has jet-black legs. 

 There is also the Icelandic Gull — killer, carrion feeder, and 

 robber of nests. Another common bird of the coasts is the Arctic 

 Tern, which spends our winter in the Antarctic, flying 11.000 

 miles across the Atlantic every year and thence down the Euro- 

 pean and African coasts and off into the latitudes known as the 

 "roaring forties" south of the Cape of Good Hope. Then there 

 are the jaegers that rob the gulls and terns — dark brown birds 

 with two long central tail feathers. 



THE GREENLAND ICECAP 



Almost half the land of this province is composed of what we 

 call Greenland. This is not altogether improperly named. While 

 85 per cent of it is covered by an icecap, the remaining 15 per 

 cent, which almost completely rims it, is composed of coastal 

 plains and bare rock cliffs. Considerable portions of the former 

 are a truly green and verdant land for a part of the year. 



Greenland has been found and then lost again more than 

 once. It was first reported by Eric the Red in 1000 A.D. as being 

 a green land: but mostly — as the ancient Icelandic writings 

 imply — for the purpose of recruiting settlers. But then it proved 

 to be just that. It seems, however, that great cold descended 

 upon it about 1400 A.D. and it then became considerably less 

 green. Next, for two centuries, it was lost altogether. The 

 whalers of the early seventeenth century "refound" it and said 

 that it was glaring white. Then it was again more or less forgot- 

 ten, until finally the modern world came to know — what the 

 Danes alone had known for three hundred years — that it is once 

 more habitable and in some respects nearly a salubrious land. 



Greenland seems always to have had a central icecap since 

 before the arrival of the first Eskimos, a Mongolian people who 

 came from east Siberia. An icecap is not just an accumulation 

 of compacted snow, nor just a place where snow never melts. 

 It has a definite structure and a life cycle. It is made, fundamen- 

 tally, of snow which falls on a land mass in sufficient quantities 

 and in a place where less of it melts than falls. As a result the 

 snow piles up and the upper layers compact those below, until 

 the whole is converted in a semicrystalline substance called firn. 



16 



