The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

In his new book, "The Friendly Arctic," Mr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson records an interesting example of play indulged in jointly by a frivolous arctic fox and eight yearling barren-ground caribou. It was a game of tag, or its wild equivalent. The fox ran into and through the group of caribou fawns, which gave chase and tried to catch the fox, but in vain. At last the fawns gave up the chase, returned to their original position, and came to parade rest. Then back came the fox. Again it scurried through the group in a most tantalizing manner, which soon provoked the fawns to chase the fox anew. At the end of this inning the caribou again abandoned the chase, whereupon the fox went off to attend to other affairs. On the whole, the play of wild animals is a large field and no writer will exhaust it with one chapter. Very sincerely do we wish that at least one of the many romance writers who are so industriously inventing wild-animal blood-and-thunder stories would do more work with his eyes and less with his imagination.