150 



THE DOG TRIBE. 



foxes, though they had never before seen the 

 face of man, flee away even when we were 

 at a great distance, and afterwards fall upon 

 an overcoat which had been left on the shore, 

 and begin gnawing and devouring the greasy 

 collar without allowing themselves to be 

 driven away by the sailors pelting them with 

 stones. Steller, who in the l^eoinning of last 



Fig. 67. — The Sahara Fox or Fennek (Cants zerda). 



century was compelled to remain a year on 

 one of the islands of Behring's .Strait, where 

 his ship had been stranded, tells the most 

 singular tales about these fo.\es. They stole 

 everything in the huts, both edible and in- 

 edible; snatched from the shipwrecked jxirty 

 the bodies of the animals which they had 

 just killed, removed the men's clothes and 

 blankets while they were sleei)ing, dug up 

 their dead in order to devour the corpses, and 

 buried their booty with such skill that it was 

 impossible for anyone to find it. All these 

 acts of theft effected with such unbounded 

 insolence had at last so enraged the ship- 

 wrecked mariners that they were not content 



with killing the foxes by the hundred, but 

 tortured the hated beasts to death in the most 

 cruel manner. 



The Arctic fox indeed devours everything 

 that a fox's stomach can digest; but its chief 

 resource consists in all sorts of birds and 

 waifs from the sea. The island of Jan Mayen, 

 on w'hich I have seen them in troops of from 

 twelve to fifteen individuals, affords no 

 other kind of food. It has neither plants 

 nor other mammals, but has swarms of 

 swimming and diving birds, which the 

 foxes are very adroit in surprising — 

 darting upon them and seizing them 

 with a sudden bound. The nests of 

 these birds — stormy petrels, auks, great 

 northern divers, and gulls — e.scape from 

 the depredations of these plunderers by 

 the fact that they are built on the sides 

 of cliffs which sink precipitously down 

 and are inaccessible to every animal 

 which cannot fly. There remains accor- 

 dingly the refuse of the sea, the skeletons 

 of whales, dolphins, seals killed on the 

 ice, fish, crustaceans, and molluscs, — in 

 short, all that can be cast upon the shore. 

 That is manifestly their sole resource in 

 winter, when they are exposed to long 

 famines. 



No attempts have ever been made to 

 tame these Arctic foxes. They always 

 remain wild and insensible to caresses. I 

 brought with me some \'ery young scarcely 

 weaned specimens, which continued to live 

 for a long while in the zoological gardens at 

 I-rankfort. Luckily our voyage from Iceland, 

 where we bought them, did not last long; for 

 I belie\c we could not have kept them much 

 longer on board the ship, they so polluted 

 everything with their abominable stench. 



The smallest, but at the same time the 

 most elegant of all the Canida, is the Sahara 

 Fox, the Fennek of the Arabs {Caiiis zcrda), 

 fig. 67. Its body measures only 18 inches 

 from the tip of the snout to the root of the 

 tail; the tail measures about 8 inches. The 



