The various ruses mentioned in the preceding chapter were all of an offensive character, employed, that is to say, by one animal in order to entrap and prey upon another. But as much cunning may be shown by a creature in avoiding death as in inflicting it, or in securing its food. The two kinds, indeed, are often combined, as was seen in the last case mentioned, where, but for its ingenious method of attack, the dog must soon have been impaled on the horns of the sable antelope, an animal in comparison with whose size and strength its own are quite insignificant. The same remark applies to those crowning instances of animal strategy in which the endeavour—constantly successful—is to avoid the artifices of man himself, since the successful springing of the trap is followed by a triumphant meal upon the bait with which it is set. There is nothing, in its way, more interesting than that keen, hard, close competition between the brain of man and beast that is going on day by day and year by year in the fur-bearing regions of the North, especially over the snowy wastes of the Hudson Bay territories in the far north of North America. The cunning shown by the arctic foxes, especially in avoiding the various kinds of snares laid by the trappers for their destruction, is truly wonderful, and we should be justified in disbelieving many of the facts narrated were they not well authenticated and, indeed, notorious in those parts. It is, for instance, quite a common “dodge” for a trapper to set his spring-jaw traps upside-down, and the reason for his doing so is that the foxes, having discovered the principle of the mechanism, are accustomed to scratch away the earth from under the trap, and then, putting their paw up—through the jaws, indeed, but from the outside, so that it cannot be enclosed between them, as they fly up—to press upon the pan and start the trap. When the trap is set upside-down, therefore, the fox is taken by surprise, and for a short time the trapper may have success. But very quickly the new experience is gained, and the traps are now started from above instead of from below. Another change may be resorted to, but this is not likely to be successful unless some time has gone by, and, of course, the natural result of continued variation in the way of setting the traps, is to make the foxes more and more observant of the way in which they lie. They become, therefore, more and more difficult to catch, and the trapper’s best plan is to keep moving from one part of the country to another, in the hope of getting a few skins in each. The reason why the foxes learn so quickly by experience is that they are not solitary-living animals, but go about either in pairs or small companies. When, therefore, one is caught, its mate or its fellows are witness of its misfortune, and have the dreadful incident stamped upon their memory, not only by reason of the fear which it inspires on their