What causes the changed standard? Who shall say? World's Fairs, in showing perfect specimens, popularise particular skins. Some princess of the blood or of bullion wears mink at a regal or republican function, and the trick is turned. The trade-ticker on mink runs skyward and a wireless thrill of warning should by poetic justice be impelled here to the shores of the Slave where Mr. and Mrs. Mink and all the little minxes love and hate and eat and sleep (with one eye open). During the last five years furs have been increasingly fashionable, and to this end no one cause has contributed so strongly as the automobile. The exhilarating motion makes necessary clothing of compact texture. This truth is self-evident and does not require the involved chain of reasoning by which a friend over our milkless teacups last night strove to prove that by all laws of the game the auto makes milk cheap.
The burden of his demonstration is this. Autos have largely done away with the keeping of horses for pleasures. Horses and horse-stables inevitably breed flies. Flies in summer worry cows, and they, to escape the annoyance, stand for hours in running streams and do not graze. For lack of food, the milk-supply yielded by the cow is scanty, and milk rises in price. The auto upsets all this, and, undeterred by the horse-bred fly, complacent cows crop grass and distend their udders with cheap and grateful milk. Now, the reasoning is plain and incontrovertible at any one point, and yet urban milk grows dearer and Northern travellers drink boiled tea au natural. Cows are the eternal feminine and will not be explained by logic.
But we are in the latitude of the fox and not the cow. Should the most valuable fox that runs be called a black-fox, or a silver-fox? What is the highest price ever paid for a fox-skin? Do not try to get to the bottom of these two innocent-looking demands. That way madness lies. "How old is Ann?" pales before this. Canadian foxes present themselves patriotically in red, white, and blue, and there are also black foxes and silver ones. The black-fox is only less elusive than the black tulip or the blue rose, and yet he inhabits the same section and cohabits often the same burrow with the red and the cross-fox. By the way, a cross-fox is not a hybrid; he bears the sign of the cross on his shoulders, and so his name. The red-fox of America is not dissimilar to the red-fox of Europe, and yet a red-fox in Canada may have a silver-fox for its mother and itself give birth to a silver-cub. At the Mission at Isle â la Crosse in latitude 55° 30', about twenty years ago, an experiment was made in breeding black-foxes. The missionary—Burbanks got two black-fox pups, male and female, and mated these when they were mature. From them always came mixed litters of red-fox, cross-fox, and black and silver. It reminds one of the Black Prince of England, who was son of a King and father of a King, yet never was a King!
We are told that Messrs. McDougall & Secord, of Edmonton, enjoy the distinction of having received the highest price for a silver-fox pelt ever paid on the London market,—$1700, that it was one of the most beautiful skins seen in the history of the trade, and that it went to the Paris Exposition. Official Russian records at St. Petersburg state, "Of the American silver-fox (Canis vulpes argentatus) black skins have a ready market at from $1500 to $4000. They are used for Court robes and by the nobles."
Tracking a Scow across Mountain Portage
And so the stories go on. A dealer in Calgary told us that last winter he had handled a silver-fox skin that subsequently brought $1950 in the London market. One quotes these tales blithely and with pleased finality. Then arises from some unsuspected quarter the voice of one cavilling in the wilderness, who contradicts your every story and finds with keen discriminating sight, "Black's not so black nor white so very white." Mr. Thompson-Seton makes declaration, "The silver-fox is but a phase or freak of a common-fox, exactly as a black sheep is, but with a difference—!" Yes, there's that fatal and fascinating difference. As we must have salmon-hatcheries, so Nature demands intelligent fox-farms, and beaver-farms, and skunk-farms. Forty acres under fur promises greater interest than even forty-bushel wheat, and, to the imaginative, the way opens up for the development of a new Cat-o-Dog or Dog-o-Cat, Goatee-rabbiticus or Rabbito-goat.
I would not like to vouch for the story told on the mosquito-portage by the half-breed driver, who declared that last year a red-fox on the Slave stole a decoy duck and hunted with it for three seasons at the river-lip, placing it among the sedges and pouncing on the lured game. He was a serious-minded saturnine Scots-Slavi and told the story without moving an eye-brow.
At Fort Smith we enjoyed a close study of the American White Pelican (Pelecanus crythrorhynchos) which in the Mountain Rapids of the Slave finds its farthest north nesting-place. It, too, has the saving grace of continuance exhibited by the grey wolf. Mackenzie, a century ago, came across the birds here, and they have persisted ever since, although in the direct line of the river-transit of the fur-traders. A wooded island in the swirl of the rapids is their wild breeding-place, and while we were there the young birds were very much in evidence. We found something fascinating about this bird, so famed in song and story. The plumage is white, relieved with rose and yellow. The pelican nests are slight depressions in the sand, some of them softened with an algoid matting. The eggs are white, rough-shelled, and equal-ended, with, so far as we could see, only one to three in a nest. One by one the illusions of childhood vanish. Some wretched historian proves without shadow of doubt that Sir John Moore at Corunna met decent daylight sepulture and was not "darkly buried at dead of night, the sod with our bayonets turning." There arises one Ferrero who demonstrates with conclusive exactness that Antony was attracted by Cleopatra's money and his breast was not stirred by the divine passion. A French scientist robs Benjamin Franklin of the kudos of his lightning-rod. I myself on Vancouver Island have happened to be in at the death of two swans, and neither gurgled a musical note but yielded the ghost in dignified silence. And now candour compels me to report that the Slave River pelican feeds her nestlings on prosaic fish without the slightest attempt to "open to her young her tender breast." It is rank libel for Byron to state