Both mentions are the same motif, and neither is natural history. 2-013: the owner of game is a tiny being with a sledge of grass who "may drive a mouse or a small root of Polygonum viviparum" — and "The lemming is his polar bear. He kills it, and loads it on his sledge." 2-010 sets the inversion the other way, an amulet-bear that loses "its former size, and the bear turns into a lemming", which Bogoras then notes is "the same in regard to the owner of game". The lemming is doing one job in this book: it is the smallest quadruped a Chukchee reader would picture, and it is there to measure how small its owner is.

Why the entry stops at a subfamily. Lemming names no clade. It is a grade spread across three tribes of Arvicolinae — Lemmini (Lemmus, Myopus, Synaptomys), Dicrostonychini (Dicrostonyx) and Lagurini — so even the tribe is too narrow to hold the English word. Chukotka has lemmings from two of those tribes at once, Lemmus and Dicrostonyx torquatus, and the two pages carry nothing that could separate them: no colour, no season, no burrow, no coat. Naming a genus here would be a claim about which lemming a storyteller had in mind, which is not a thing the text records. Arvicolinae is the smallest node that certainly contains it.

Distinct from Rodentia's mice, which stops higher for the opposite reason — mouse in ordinary English is a grade of small rodent and gives up almost nothing, where lemming names a real recognisable group and giving that up would lose what the sentence is using.