d to give them striking
power for their fangs. Mink's under lip has a mere rim of white or
yellow. Marten's breast is patched sulphur. But this short marten with a
tail shorter than other marten differs from his kind as to fur. Both
mink and marten fur are reddish brown; but this short marten's fur is
almost black, of great depth, of great thickness, and of three
qualities: (1) There are the long dark overhairs the same as the
ordinary marten, only darker, thicker, deeper; (2) there is the soft
under fur of the ordinary marten, usually fawn, in this fellow deep
brown; (3) there is the skin fur resembling chicken-down, of which this
little marten has such a wealth--to use a technical expression--you
cannot find his scalp. Without going into the old quarrel about species,
when a marten has these peculiarities, he is known to the trapper as
sable.

Whether he is the American counterpart to the Russia sable is a disputed
point. Whether his superior qualities are owing to age, climate,
species, it is enough for the trapper to know that short, dark marten
yields the trade--sable.

CHAPTER XVIII

UNDER THE NORTH STAR--WHERE FOX AND ERMINE RUN

I

_Of Foxes, Many and Various--Red, Cross, Silver, Black, Prairie, Kit or
Swift, Arctic, Blue, and Gray_

Wherever grouse and rabbit abound, there will foxes run and there will
the hunter set steel-traps. But however beautiful a fox-skin may be as a
specimen, it has value as a fur only when it belongs to one of three
varieties--Arctic, black, and silver. Other foxes--red, cross, prairie,
swift, and gray--the trapper will take when they cross his path and sell
them in the gross at the fur post, as he used to barter buffalo-hides.
But the hunter who traps the fox for its own sake, and not as an
uncalculated extra to the mink-hunt or the beaver total, must go to the
Far North, to the land of winter night and midnight sun, to obtain the
best fox-skins.

It matters not to the trapper that the little kit fox or swift at run
among the hills between the Missouri and Saskatchewan is the most
shapely of all the fox kind, with as finely pointed a nose as a spitz
dog, ears alert as a terrier's and a brush, more like a lady's gray
feather boa than fur, curled round his dainty toes. Little kit's fur is
a grizzled gray shading to mottled fawn. The hairs are coarse, horsey,
indistinctly marked, and the fur is of small value to the trader; so
dainty little swift, who looks as if n