s and red and gray.
Trappers find all these different cubs in one burrow; but as the cubs
grow, those pronounced cross turn out to be red, or the red becomes
cross; and what they become at maturity, that they remain, varying only
with the seasons.[45] It takes many centuries to make one perfect rose.
Is it the same with the silver fox? Is he a freak or a climax or the
regular product of yearly climatic changes caught in the nick of time by
some lucky trapper? Ask the scientist that question, and he theorizes.
Ask the trapper, and he tells you if he could only catch enough silver
foxes to study that question, he would quit trapping. In all the maze of
ignorance and speculation, there is one anchored fact. While animals
turn a grizzled gray with age, the fine gray coats are not caused by
age. Young animals of the rarest furs--fox and ermine--are born in ashy
colour that turns to gray while they are still in their first nest.

To say that silver fox is costly solely because it is rare is sheerest
nonsense. It would be just as sensible to say that labradorite, which is
rare, should be as costly as diamonds. It is the intrinsic beauty of the
fur, as of the diamonds, that constitutes its first value. The facts
that the taking of a silver fox is always pure luck, that the luck comes
seldom, that the trapper must have travelled countless leagues by
snow-shoe and dog train over the white wastes of the North, that
trappers in polar regions are exposed to more dangers and hardships than
elsewhere and that the fur must have been carried a long distance to
market--add to the first high value of silver fox till it is not
surprising that little pelts barely two feet long have sold for prices
ranging from $500 to $5,000. For the trapper the way to the fortune of
a silver fox is the same as the road to fortune for all other men--by
the homely trail of every-day work. Cheers from the fort gates bid
trappers setting out for far Northern fields God-speed. Long ago there
would have been a firing of cannon when the Northern hunters left for
their distant camping-grounds; but the cannon of Churchill lie rusting
to-day and the hunters who go to the sub-Arctics and the Arctics no
longer set out from Churchill on the bay, but from one of the little
inland MacKenzie River posts. If the fine powdery snow-drifts are
glossed with the ice of unbroken sun-glare, the runners strap iron
crampets to their snow-shoes, and with a great jingling of the
dog-