m nigrum_, a plant common on our own hills, and
goes to the shore for mussels and other shell-fish. Otho Fabricius[117]
says he catches the Arctic salmon as that fish approaches the shore to
spawn, and that he seizes too the haddock, having enticed it near by
beating the water. Crantz, in his "History of Greenland," evidently
alludes to this cunning habit when he observes, "They plash with their
feet in the water, to excite the curiosity of some kinds of fishes to
come and see what is going forward, and then they snap them up; and _the
Greenland women have learnt this piece of art from them_." Captain Lyon
noticed a fox prowling on a hill-side, and heard him for some hours
afterwards in the neighbourhood imitating the cry of the brent-goose. In
another part of his Journal he mentions that the bark is so modulated as
to give an idea that it proceeds from a distance, though at the time the
fox lies at your feet. It struck him that the creature was gifted "with
this kind of ventriloquism in order to deceive its prey as to the
distance it is from them." It sometimes catches the ptarmigan; and
though it cannot swim, it manages occasionally to get hold of oceanic
birds; in fact, nothing alive which it can master seems to come amiss,
and failing to make a meal from something it has caught and killed, the
Arctic fox is glad, like foxes in more favoured lands, to feed on
carrion.

Captain M'Clintock, who commanded the yacht _Fox_ on the Franklin Arctic
search in 1857 and 1858, wintered in the ice pack of Baffin's Bay. One
of the party shot an Arctic fox when they were 140 miles from the land.
He records in a letter to his brother,[118] that this wanderer from the
shore "was very fat, living upon such few dovekies as were silly enough
to spend their winter in the pack."

Martens, in his "Spitzbergen," says, that some of the ship's crew
informed him, that the fox when he is hungry "lies down as if he was
dead, until the birds fly to him to eat him, which by that trick he
catches and eats." Our author believed it a fable, but it may
nevertheless be one of the many expedients used by a species of a group
whose name is proverbial for craftiness and cunning.

The flesh of the fox is occasionally eaten by the Esquimaux: Captain
Lyon, in his "Private Journal," says that at first all of his party were
horrified at the idea of eating foxes--"But very many soon got the
better of their fastidiousness and found them good eating; not being