The musk-ox (Ovibos moschatus) is a gregarious animal which would appear to be a Creator’s after-thought,—­something between an ox and a sheep.  The long hair hanging down from the body foreshortens the appearance of the legs and gives a quaint look to the moving herd.  The present range of the musk-ox is from Fort Rae north to the Arctic and between the meridians of 86 deg. and 125 deg..  As it is the most inaccessible game in the world, there would seem to be no immediate fear of its being hunted to extinction.  Toothed like a sheep, footed like an ox, tailed like a bear, and maned like a horse, the musk-ox does not circle up wind as the moose and caribou do, but travels in any direction he sees fit.  Each little herd of ten or fifteen bunches up, tails to the middle and horns outside, to meet a common danger.  The robe of the musk-ox is a rich, dark brown streaked with grey, the hair all over the body being very long, with a coat of mouse-coloured wool at its base.  According to the Indians, the single young of the musk-ox is born in April.  The mother buries the calf in the snow as soon as it is born, selecting a sheltered place for the cradle.  Three days after its post-natal burial it is able to frisk with its dam and begin to take up the musk-calf’s burden.

[Illustration:  The Musk-ox]

We are all day and all night crossing Great Slave Lake from Fort Rae to Fort Resolution.  Food values and the outgoing cargo of fur are the topics of conversation.  Years ago a delicate baby at Rae required milk, and with trouble and expense a cow was evolved from somewhere and deposited at the front door of the H.B.  Co.  Factor there—­a cow but no cow-food.  All animals must learn to be adaptable in the North.  She was fed on fish and dried meat, lived happily, and produced milk after her kind.  One of Mr. Keele’s men tells of a horse on the Yukon side which ate bacon-rinds with a relish.  The dogs at Smith eat raspberries, climb trees for a succulent moss, and when times are really hard become burglars, burgling bacon in the night season, and even being ghoulish enough to visit Indian cemeteries to pick a bone with the dead.  A dog in the North Country is surely qualifying for some canine heaven in the asphodel meadows.  I know of no created being who is undergoing a sterner probation than this creature forced by man and the exigencies of Fate to work like a horse in winter and live on air in summer.

From Great Slave Lake to Chipewyan the days are enlivened with stories from the outgoing traders.  We learn that when the church was still young, some priests on the Mackenzie hungered after flesh-pots in the wilderness and wrote to the Pope, asking him whether beaver-tails were to be considered fish, or flesh.  Rome evidently was not “long” on North American mammals and put itself into the class of Nature fakers forever by declaring said tails “fish” and not flesh.  This is why you can discuss beaver-tails on top of the world on Fridays to this present and commit no sin.