We clambered aboard our boat against the pitch of the waves and just before dusk, the fog lifted a bit and showed the dark outline of a rocky shore, the island of St. George. The gateway to this second forbidden island in the Bering Straits could not have been better designed by Nature to discourage the fainthearted. A jagged reef lies low along the front where, even in calm weather, the rollers from the Arctic gain their momentum over many hundred miles to tear in white rage at this rocky approach. Straight toward destruction our bidarrah rowed, but stopped just short of the reef, while the biggest breaker of them all spent itself in a shower of spray. Then, with straining backs, the Aleuts bent to the task and we slipped past the end of the reef and into smooth water behind this barrier.
We were soon as pleasantly located in the government house as we had been on the neighbouring St. Paul, and I wasn't long in discovering that rare blue foxes wander about the back yards and along the village walks like town dogs at home. No real dogs are allowed on the Pribilofs, and this rule is strictly enforced to prevent disease and contamination of the purebred royal fox strain on the island. This is a sad blow at the youthful Aleuts' love of pets, but St. George is not totally without a pet, for one black and white cat makes up the entire feline population. Poor pussy, one might say, with foxes surrounding her village and with but one flagpole to climb.
The fact is, however, that Tabby is a nightmare to every fox that crosses her path. At her near approach, every fox hunts his hole; and I noticed that even the mother with a brood of eight pups under the schoolhouse ranged at a distance when Tabby sat on the steps. Perhaps the lack of dogs in the little Aleuts' life was more than made up by the bumping of little heads against the wooden supports under their school room, as the young foxes played. I noticed that the other buildings in the village had wire netting about the foundations to keep foxes from burrowing underneath and setting up their homes.
The blue fox of the Pribilofs that ranges over both these large islands is of a different race from the common red fox; his face is more dog-like. The white fox of the Arctic has a winter coat of white that changes in summer to dark brown on the back and shoulders and tawny below. Many years ago it is very likely that this was the appearance of most of the foxes living on the Pribilofs, but being isolated for generations on these far-off islands, the white strain has been largely eliminated, and they have been described as a separate race. Practically all these foxes change from sooty-gray in summer to a bluish-gray in winter, thus earning the common name of blue foxes.
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