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thick as wool, the poachers venture in ashore to the rookeries. So great is the haste of their bloody work to escape before the fog lifts, that the raiders often skin the seals alive, not stopping to see that the blow of the gaff club has caused death.

As for sea otter, it has come so near extinction that it may almost be written down as one of the furs no longer obtainable. Four years ago when I made enquiries on the Pacific Coast as to the take of sea otter, I put down the decrease from 150,000 a year in a century to 400 a year; and those figures have been diligently copied ever since. They are no longer correct. The annual take is now nearer 200 than 400. Of the fur, itself, little need be said except that the pelt is the largest of the sea furs and finer in texture and depth than either seal or silver fox.

Beaver is today practically extinct in the United States, or almost so. Ten years ago, it became so scarce in Canada that the Dominion Government established a closed season for a term of years. This closed season has now expired; and once more the trapper will wage war on the beautiful rodent of marsh and woods. If he is permitted to wage war with dynamite and on male and female and young indiscriminately, beaver will again become scarce to the point of almost extinction.

Does all this augur the extinction of fur trading, the oldest industry of man, the industry that lured explorers across America in search of the beaver; and Cossacks across Siberia in search of the sable; and Russians across the Pacific in search

of the sea otter? Have we reached the last chapter in fur?

Frankly and with the deepest respect for the prophets of evil, and from a life time in the Northwest, I do not think so. The oldest industry of mankind, the most heroic and protective against the elements against Fenris and Loki and all those Spirits of Evil with which Northern myth has personified Coldfur hunting, fur trading, will last long as man lasts.

We are entering, not on the extermination of fur, but on a new cycle of smaller furs. In the days when mink went begging at eighty cents, mink was not fashionable. Mink is fashionable today; hence the absurd and fabulous prices of $900 and $1,000 for a lady's opera cloak. Long ago, when ermine as minevir-the garb of nobility-was fashionable and exclusive, it commanded fabulous prices. Radicalism abolished the exclusive garb of royalty; and ermine fell to four cents. a pelt, advanced to twenty-five cents and recently has sold at one dollar. Today, mink is the fashion, and the little mink is pursued; but tomorrow fashion will veer with the caprices of the wind. Some other fur will come into favor; and the little mink will have a chance to multiply as the ermine has multiplied.

Be it noted here-buffalo were ex

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terminated, not because of the pursuit of the fur-for the pelts rotted unsold in St. Louis warehouses in the 1830's and 40's or were used as leather-buffalo were exterminated because the buffalo pasture grounds were cut up into barbwire fenced farms by the transcontinental railways.

The seal and the sea otter have been reduced almost to extinction-not by the fur hunters; for the true fur hunter never destroys the female or the young -but by the poachers, by the fact that international law was involved and the nations of the United States, Canada, Japan and Russia could not sink their other hostilities long enough to come together and regulate fur hunting. The monopolist never destroys the source of his own prosperity. When competing monopolists come together on the same field, they destroy on the principle "if they don't, the other fellows will." Of this, I found a curious example when examining the documents of the Hudson's Bay Company in London five years ago. It was in the early 1820's. Peter Skene Ogden was scouring south of the Columbia with fur brigades of 200 men; Ross was leading his hunters on the Upper Missouri. The only section of the Hudson's Bay Company's field from California to the Arctic, where instructions were issued to clean out all beaver irrespective of age, size, sex, was south of

the Saskatchewan; "for if we don't" declared Ogden, "the Americans under General Ashley will." General Ashley will." The same spirit was exemplified last year. It was before the Canadian Club of Ottawa, Canada. I had been pointing out the fact that the seal was being exterminated, not by the true fur hunter but by the poacher-the Japanese and Russian and Canadian raider, who swooped down on the unprotected rookeries, or shot the mother seal swimming in and out of the pelagic zone. A man, who had been secretary to one of the sealing commissioners, came up to me after the lecture. "You are wrong," he said, "you are wrong I tell you in blaming Canadians. If Americans hog the whole thing, then I say, let the Canadians go in and kill every blamed cub. I'd shoot every last seal in the sea rather than let them beat us and hog it all."

"Meanwhile," I answered, "what becomes of the seal?"

"I don't care," he said. "We'll show them."

This spirit of international jealousyshall I call it hoggery?-and not the spirit of the true hunter, is what has brought the seal and the sea otter almost to extermination.

As for the beaver, he is not an Arctic animal. He is a denizen of the temperate marshes. What has become of his marshes? Read the Congressional reports on reclamation and draining.

SOME THIRTY THOUSAND DOLLARS WORTH OF GRAY AND SILVER FOX SKINS.

Where beaver dams once lapped to wind and reed west of Lake Michigan, stands the city of Chicago. Like the buffalo, the little beaver has witnessed his habitat cut up into cities and farms; but where city and farm can never gonorth of the Saskatchewan, in Labrador, down MacKenzie River, on the marshes of the hinterland of Ontario-the little beaver still plies his furtive calling of damming sluggish streams and converting marshes into meadows.

In spite of the cry of the end of fur, more furs were marketed in the world last year than ever before in the

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history of the race-forty million dollars worth; twenty million of which were handled in New York and Chicago and St. Louis and St. Paul; some five millions passing through Edmonton and Winnipeg and Montreal and Quebec, three millions for home consumption, two millions plus for export. Five years ago I went through all the Minutes of the Hudson's Bay Company in London. from 1670 to 1824, and have transcripts of those Minutes now in my library. In not a single year did the fur record exceed half a million dollars worth. Compare that to the American traffic today of twenty millions; or to the three and four hundred thousand dollar cargoes that each of the Hudson's Bay Company and Revillons' ships bears to Europe from Canada yearly. The muskrat marshes of New Jersey and Delaware. have been hunted diligently for half a century; yet they last year yielded between four and five million pelts of the little water rodent that lines fur coats.

There is another remoter but understandable cause for these cycles of seeming scarcity and higher prices for furs. "Once in seven years, regular as the years come round, from some cause that I have never heard any scientist explain, rabbits die off in the North of pestilence," said the Revillons' chief guide to me, as we canoed down Saskatchewan River two years ago.

"Yes," interjected the Hudson's Bay Bay tripman,

whom we had taken on as paddler for an especially long stretch of rapids, "and when waupoose is scarce, all the other. fellows are going to go meat hungry."

"It's like this," explained the head guide. "When rabbits fall off, lynx and wolverine and all the other meat eaters are not going to be in as good fur the next year-won't likely have as fine litters; and the kits may starve. That means scarce fur for a year. The rabbit plague is about due now. That means higher prices for the rabbit eaters next year."

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"Do they always have this plague every seven years?" I asked.

"Always have since I have come to the country; and that is twenty-four years ago."

"And the fur is always better when the animals eat meat?"

"No-not of all animals. It is of lynx

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INDIAN PACKERS PORTAGING PAST A RAPID.

A TRAPPER OF THE NORTH.

and wolverine; but when the marten, or what the Russians call wood sable, eats mice, like a cat it grows poor and lean. You always find the marten in the berry country; and when it eats berries, it is fat and its fur is fine and beautifully glossy. Its pelt will command all the way from $8 to $32 according to quality. I tell you a few of those fellows will make you rich. The fur doesn't require any dyeing, just drying and tanning; and it doesn't spoil in sun or rain. We usually catch them in dead falls; and when they are meat hungry, they will eat each other's heads off in the traps. You

always get the mink and the muskrat best in the small game marsh country; and the marten and the lynx in the wood and berry country where rabbit is plentiful. Otter are hard to get because at the season when they are in colonies, the fur is no good-a trapper won't take them. When the fur is in season, they are off solitary. You look out for them fishing round ice holes."

"How much can a good Indian hunter make in a season?" I asked this because in nearly all accounts written about furs, you read a wail of reproach at milady for wearing furs when trapping entails such hardship and poverty on the part of the hunter.

"A good hunter easily earns $600 or $700 a winter if he will go out and not hang round the minute he gets a little ahead. It takes from $3,000 to $4,000 to outfit a small free trader to go up North on his own account. This stock, he will turn over three or four times at a profit of one hundred per cent. on the supplies. For example, $10 cash will buy a good black ofter up North [1908]. In trade, it will cost from $12 to $15. On the articles of trade, the profit will be fifty per cent. The otter will sell down at Edmonton from $20 to $30. It's the same of muskrat. At the beginning of the season when the kits are plentiful and small, the trader pays nine cents for them up North. Down at the fur market he will get from twenty-five to sixty cents for them according to size. There were 132,000 muskrat came to one firm of traders alone in Edmonton this year, which they will sell at an advance of fifty per cent."

At the very next fur post, where we stopped-the big game country west of

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old Fort Pitt-it was easily estimated that the trader took in $40,000 of supplies a year, and sent out $125,000 of furs; but it is not all so profitable and easy as it sounds. Comes the hard year when the pest sweeps off the rabbits or drought dries out old marshes-which latter is very seldom owing to the supply of moisture from the winter's heavy snow-and the Indian hunters, who never save, demand advances on credit from the trader. If he refuses, they will never again bring him a pelt. To hold their good will he advances flour, tea and perhaps some clothes. When the good years come again, he finds that the Indian owes a prior debt to some other trader. If the banks will not carry him past this second into a third season, the free trader goes bankrupt. At the first post where we stopped in the swamp or muskrat country north east of the Saskatchewan, we met a free trader, who had bought 32,000 muskrat his first year and cleaned up a tidy profit; but his second year in order to hold trade, he extended too much credit. Winter set in early and lasted late. The muskrat hunt was poor. The Indians could not pay their debts and the trader sold out to The Company -The Company standing for only one firm in the Northwest-the H. B. C. which old-timers irreverently translate, "Here B. C."

"How much fur comes yearly to Ed

monton?" I asked. If you look at the map you will see that Edmonton is the jumping off place to three of the greatest fur fields of North America-down MacKenzie River to the Arctic, up Peace River to the mountain hinterland between the Columbia and the Yukon, east through Athabasca Lake to the wild Barren Land inland from Churchill and Hudson Bay.

"Well, we can easily calculate that. I know about how much is brought in to each of the traders there."

I took pencil while he gave me the names. It totalled up to $600,000 worth for 1908. When you consider that in its palmiest old days of exclusive monopoly, The Company never sold more than half a million dollars worth of furs a year, $600,000 total for Edmonton alone does not sound like a scarcity of furs.

The question may be asked, do not these large figures presage the hunting to extinction of fur bearing animals? I do not think so; and my knowledge of the West is not gained from the windows. of a Pullman car as much expert knowledge of the Northwest is. Two years ago a very flamboyant article came out accusing a circle of writers on the Northwest-myself among the number-of gross misstatement of facts. "Canadian fakirs," was I believe the phrase. Among other questions, it was asked with that mock indignation so comic with sparse

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