dless
unbroken snow, the glint of icy particles filling the air, the starlight
brilliant as diamond points, the Aurora Borealis in curtains and shafts
and billows of tenuous impalpable rose-coloured fire--all brighten the
polar night so that the sun is unmissed. This is the region chiefly
hunted by the Eskimo, with a few white men and Chippewyan half-breeds.
The regular Northern hunters do not go as far as the Arctics, but choose
their hunting-ground somewhere in the region of "little sticks," meaning
the land where timber growth is succeeded by dwarf scrubs.

The hunting-ground is chosen always from the signs written across the
white page of the snow. If there are claw-marks, bird signs of Northern
grouse or white ptarmigan or snow-bunting, ermine will be plentiful; for
the Northern birds with their clogged stockings of feet feathers have a
habit of floundering under the powdery snow; and up through that powdery
snow darts the snaky neck of stoat, the white weasel-hunter of birds. If
there are the deep plunges of the white hare, lynx and fox and mink and
marten and pekan will be plentiful; for the poor white hare feeds all
the creatures of the Northern wastes, man and beast. If there are little
dainty tracks--oh, such dainty tracks that none but a high-stepping,
clear-cut, clean-limbed, little thoroughbred could make them!--tracks of
four toes and a thumb claw much shorter than the rest, with a padding of
five basal foot-bones behind the toes, tracks that show a fluff on the
snow as of furred foot-soles, tracks that go in clean, neat, clear long
leaps and bounds--the hunter knows that he has found the signs of the
Northern fox.

Here, then, he will camp for the winter. Camping in the Far North means
something different from the hastily pitched tent of the prairie. The
north wind blows biting, keen, unbroken in its sweep. The hunter must
camp where that wind will not carry scent of his tent to the animal
world. For his own sake, he must camp under shelter from that wind,
behind a cairn of stones, below a cliff, in a ravine. Poles have been
brought from the land of trees on the dog sleigh. These are put up,
criss-crossed at top, and over them is laid, not the canvas tent, but a
tent of skins, caribou, wolf, moose, at a sharp enough angle to let the
snow slide off. Then snow is banked deep, completely round the tent. For
fire, the Eskimo depends on whale-oil and animal grease. The white man
or half-breed from the South h