206 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



burrows and paths, under and among the grassy hummocks and 

 mossy flats, checkered every square rod of land there covered with 

 this vegetation. Although the Island of St. Paul is but twenty-nine 

 or thirty miles to the northwest, not a single one of these active, 

 curious little animals is found there, nor could I learn from the 

 natives that it had ever been seen there. The foxes are also re- 

 stricted to these islands ; that is, their kind, which are not found 

 elsewhere, except the stray examples on St. Matthew seen by my- 

 self, and those which are carefully domesticated and preserved at 

 Attoo, the extreme westernmost land of the Aleutian chain. These 

 animals find comfortable holes for their accommodation and retreat 

 on the Seal Islands, among the countless chinks and crevices of the 

 basaltic formation. They feed and grow fat upon sick and weakly 

 seals, also devouring many of the pups, and they vary this diet by 

 water-fowl and eggs* during the summer, returning for their sub- 

 sistence during the long winter to the bodies of seals upon the 

 breeding-grounds and the skinned carcasses left upon the killing- 

 fields. Were they not regularly hunted from December until April, 

 when their fur is in its prime beauty and condition, they would 

 swarm like the lemming on St. George, and perhaps would soon be 

 obliged to eat one another. The natives, however, thin them out 

 by incessant trapping and shooting during the period when the 

 seals are away from the islands. 



The Pribylov group is as yet free from rats ; at least none have 



* The temerity of the fox is wonderful to contemplate, as it goes on a full 

 run or stealthy tread up and down and along the faces of almost inaccessible 

 bluffs, in search of old and young birds and their nests and eggs, for which the 

 "peeschee" have a keen relish. The fox always brings an egg up in its 

 mouth, and, carrying it back a few feet from the brink of the precipice, lei- 

 surely and with gusto breaks the larger end and sucks the contents from the 

 shell. One of the curious sights of my notice, in this connection, was the sly, 

 artful, and insidious advances of Reynard at Tolstoi Mees, St. George, where, 

 conspicuous and elegant in its fluffy white dress, it cunningly stretched on its 

 back as though dead, making no sign of life whatever, save to gently hoist its 

 thick brush now and then ; whereupon many dull, curious sea-birds, Graculus 

 bicristatits, in their intense desire to know all about it, flew in narrowing cir- 

 cles overhead, lower and lower, closer and closer, until one of them came 

 within the sure reach of a sudden spring and a pair of quick snapping jaws, 

 while the gulls and others, rising safe and high above, screamed out in seem- 

 ing contempt for the struggles of the unhappy " shag," and rendered hideous 

 approbation. 



