Unless the Circumpolar Bowhead is to become extinct within a decade, the thinking world should strengthen the hands of the Canadian authorities in an effort to put a close season for four or five years on the great Arctic Baleen Whale. At their rate of reproduction it is not so easy to restock a whale pasture as a salmon stream. Cutting down a whale which has taken ten centuries to grow is like cutting down an oak-tree with a thousand concentric rings. You cannot in one or two or twenty scant generations of man grow another one to take its place.
CHAPTER XVII
SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN
"The old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,
That blaze in the velvet blue.
They're God's own guides on the Long Trail—
The trail that is always new."
Kipling