ox and black and
blue are prizes enough in themselves, netting as much to the trapper as
mink or beaver or sable.

II

_The White Ermine_

All that was said of the mystery of fox life applies equally to ermine.
Why is the ermine of Wisconsin and Minnesota and Dakota a dirty little
weasel noted for killing forty chickens in a night, wearing a
mahogany-coloured coat with a sulphur strip down his throat, while the
ermine of the Arctics is as white as snow, noted for his courage,
wearing a spotless coat which kings envy, yes, and take from him? For a
long time the learned men who study animal life from museums held that
the ermine's coat turned white from the same cause as human hair, from
senility and debility and the depleting effect of an intensely trying
climate. But the trappers told a different story. They told of baby
ermine born in Arctic burrows, in March, April, May, June, while the
mother was still in white coat, babies born in an ashy coat something
like a mouse-skin that turned to fleecy white within ten days. They told
of ermine shedding his brown coat in autumn to display a fresh layer of
iron-gray fur that turned sulphur white within a few days. They told of
the youngest and smallest and strongest ermine with the softest and
whitest coats. That disposed of the senility theory. All the trapper
knows is that the whitest ermine is taken when the cold is most intense
and most continuous, that just as the cold slackens the ermine coat
assumes the sulphur tinges, deepening to russet and brown, and that the
whitest ermine instead of showing senility, always displays the most
active and courageous sort of deviltry.

Summer or winter, the Northern trapper is constantly surrounded by
ermine and signs of ermine. There are the tiny claw-tracks almost like
frost tracery across the snow. There is the rifled nest of a poor
grouse--eggs sucked, or chickens murdered, the nest fouled so that it
emits the stench of a skunk, or the mother hen lying dead from a wound
in her throat. There is the frightened rabbit loping across the fields
in the wildest, wobbliest, most woe-begone leaps, trying to shake
something off that is clinging to his throat till over he tumbles--the
prey of a hunter that is barely the size of rabbit's paw. There is the
water-rat flitting across the rocks in blind terror, regardless of the
watching trapper, caring only to reach safety--water--water! Behind
comes the pursuer--this is no still hunt but