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 a la Crosse in latitude 55 deg. 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.”

[Illustration:  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.