down his hunting gear said, “There, it had better all be destroyed, I will have no luck with it more.”  Shortly afterwards a fish-staging fell on his son, for which the dead wolf was held responsible.  As the female wolf has from three to five young at a litter and as the mother buffalo gives birth to but one calf, Fate, in both birth-rate and death-rate, would seem to favour the smaller animal.  It is up to the red-coated lads of the river-edge to appear in the drama as gods-from-the-machine.  While one’s sympathy is with the shaggy bison host, still one cannot withhold admiration for the grit and tenacity of the wolf.  Archbishop Tache tells of the persevering fortitude of a big wolf caught years ago in a steel trap at Isle a la Crosse.  Thirty days afterwards, near Green Lake, a hundred miles away, it was killed, with trap and wood block still fixed to a hind leg.  The poor brute through the intense cold of a Northern winter had dragged this burden all those weary miles.

With Fort Smith as a centre, there remains an unmarred fur-preserve and a race of hardy trappers.  Is the fur-trade diminishing?  Statistics are extremely difficult to get, dealers do not publish dividend-sheets, the stockholders of the Mother-Lodge of the H.B.  Company do not advertise.  There is no import duty on raw skins into the United States, and so no means of keeping tally on the large shipments of fur which yearly find their way south from Canada.  The statistics which are available overlap.  Raw furs making out by Montreal to Europe come back, many of them, as manufactured imports into this continent by way of New York.  Canada in 1904 sent to her American cousins furs and skins and manufactures of the same to the value of $670,472.  This year the export has been more than doubled; the exact figures are $1,531,912.  In 1908, Canada sent to France $110,184 worth of raw and manufactured fur, to Germany $23,173 worth, and to Belgium $19,090 worth.

More money goes to the trapper to-day for such common skins as red-fox and skunk and muskrat than was ever paid to the fur-hunter for beaver, seal, and sea-otter in the old days.  Six million dollars worth of raw furs are sold annually by auction in London, and Canada is the Mother Country’s chief feeder.  Included in these London sales are some hundred thousand martens, or Hudson Bay sables, and probably four times that number of mink.  The imports of raw furs and exports of the manufactured article cross each other so perplexingly that to-day the wearer of fur clothing has no way of finding out in what part of the world her stole or cap or jacket had origin.  On the feet of the sacrificed animal, by snowshoe of trapper and scow of the trader, it may have travelled half round the world before, in the shop-window, it tempted her taste and pocket-book.  Furs will be always fashionable; the poet of old who declared, “I’ll rob no ermyn of his dainty skin to make mine own grow proud,” would find scanty following among the women of fashion in this age.