OF THE Hudson's bat tekuitort. 



143 



snow — prevents it freezing up. These liuts enable the rats to 

 extend their feeding ground to all parts of the pond, which could 

 not be reached at all, or with difficulty, from the house if they 

 had to swim home every time with, a mouthful of food, to eat it. 

 With these little shelters thej are saved a great amount of labour 

 and are enabled to reach all the food in the pond.* I remember » 

 when on a snow-shoe journey, one of my men went very quietly 

 up to one of these miniature mud huts, and knocked it over with 

 his axe, disclosing a live rat with some of the food it had been 

 eating. The practice of building these little eating huts is by 

 no means common, and does not seem to be resorted to when 

 the pond is of moderate dimensions, and all parts of it can be 

 reached from the house without difficulty. 



I am not aware if it is generally known that the lemmings 

 {Myodes hudsonicus, &c.) of North America migrate much in 

 the same manner as do those of Norway and Sweden. When 

 travelling in June 1851 southward from the Arctic coast along 

 the west bank of the Coppermine River, and north of the Arctic 

 Circle, we met with thousands of these lemmings speeding north- 

 ward, and as the ice on some of the smaller streams had broken 

 up, it was amusing to see these little creatures running back- 

 wards and forwards along the banks looking for a smooth place 

 with slow current at which to swim across. Having found this, 

 they at once jumped in, swam very fast, and on reaching the 

 opposite side gave themselves a good shake as a dog vt'ould, and 

 continued their journey as if nothing had happened. At that 

 date the sun was above the horizon all hours of the 24, and we 

 were travelling by night to avoid the snow-glare in our eyes, the 

 sun being then in our rear. As the lemmings appeared to travel 

 only by night, we should not have seen them had we been 

 travelling in the daytime, for they then hide themselves under the 

 snow, or stones. The man who was carrying our cooking utensils 

 and small supply of provisions, having, when fording a stream, 

 been swept into a deep hole by the current, whereby his whole 

 load was lost, we had, for a day or two, to live chiefly on 

 lemmings roasted between thin plates of limestone, and found 

 them very fat and good. Our dogs easily killed as many as they 

 required. Prior to this, whilst on the coast, crossing the ice to 

 islands some miles distant, a lemming was noticed defending 



* The beaver, especially when its clam is large, scrapes holes in the banks 

 from under water upwards until above the water-level, to which it retires to feed 

 instead of going back to its house.— J. R. 



