Carnivore Diet

Ovis dalli (Nelson ). Northern Mountain Sheep. Imp'nak (Alaskan Eskimo). 

Lamb, during the first year, No'wak. 

Two-year old, with short horns, Ki-rūtai'lak. 

Adult female, Kūl'la -vủk. 

Adult male, Ang - a -ti-shūg-růk (literally big male). Slavey Indian name, Tho. 

The White Sheep probably never ranged east of the Mackenzie, although they are said to be still fairly common in the mountains on the west side of the river from Fort Norman to the west side of the delta. The Endicott Mountains, or that branch of the northern Rockies which runs northwest from the western edge of the Mackenzie delta, form a divide ten or fifteen miles from the coast west from the coast at Herschel Island and seventy-five or one hundred miles from the coast at the Colville, the largest river flowing into the Arctic in northern Alaska. Sheep were formerly quite numerous on the heads of nearly all the rivers on the Arctic side of the divide, at least as far west as the Colville. It is probable that until comparatively recent times, before whaling ships began to winter at Herschel Island in 1889, the sheep were not much hunted in this region. The population was sparse, and the Caribou were larger, more abundant, and more easily taken. The gradual extermination of the Caribou in northwestern Alaska, combined with other causes, has for many years induced Eskimo from the rivers at the head of Kotzebue Sound to move across to the Colville, at the same time that many Colville Eskimo have gradually moved eastward, occupying one mountain valley after another until the sheep became too scarce to support them. A considerable number of sheepskins have been sent west each year with the Cape Smyth natives who came east each year to barter white men goods for Sheep and Caribou skins. In my expedition into the Endicott Mountains from October, 1908, to April, 1909, I hunted sheep with the Eskimo on both sides of the Endicott Mountain divide, and found sheep much more common on the north side of the divide than on the south side, although the south side of the mountains is an uninhabited wilderness. On the Hula-hula River, which has a course of about forty-five miles in the mountains and about the same distance across the central plain, we found two families of Eskimo sheep -hunters. One of these Eskimo had in this small river valley killed thirty or thirty-five sheep from June to August, 1908, and thirty-seven from September, 1908, to May, 1909, subsisting with his whole family almost entirely on sheep meat. This man's clothing from head to foot was made of sheepskins, his tent of sheepskins, and even his snowshoes strung with sheepskin thongs. Many people in the north prefer the skin of the Mountain Sheep to Caribou for clothing. Although the outer hair of the Sheep is brittle, only the ends of the hairs break off, and the sheepskin never becomes wholly denuded, while the Caribou skin garment becomes bare in spots on very slight provocation. 

Although the rocky slopes where the sheep feed look pretty barren, the sheep manage to find enough to eat. The stomachs usually contain grass, and sometimes moss. The natives say the sheep do not browse on willows, although they often descend to the willows in the summer time. In winter the sheep usually keep to the higher ridges where the snow is less deep. They do not appear to paw the snow away, as it is seldom crusted hard, but browse through the snow, pushing it aside with the nose. Sheep are singularly unsuspicious of danger from above, although they are continually on the alert for enemies from below. Their eyesight is almost telescopic, the scent and hearing equally acute, and it is practically impossible to approach them from below. The hunter therefore always endeavors to work around some adjoining ridge or ascend some creek valley and approach them from above. In this manner, the native hunters sometimes approach within fifteen or twenty yards and kill several out of one band. The lambs are said to be born very early in the season, much earlier than the Caribou, while the snow is still on the ground. The natives told me that in summer the sheep sometimes go up on the ice-capped mountains when the mosquitoes get very bad on the lower ranges, but that they come down again towards evening, as there is no grass on the high mountain tops. 

Although the numbers of sheep have been greatly reduced, I believe that a few are still found near the head of every mountain river from the Colville to the Mackenzie. The natives hunt strictly for meat and skins, and the habitat of the sheep prevents the hunters in this particular region from picking up sheep as a side line to other game hunting and trapping. When a local influx of hunters cuts down the number of sheep beyond a certain limit in some mountain valley, pressure of hunger soon causes the people to move out. Word is passed along that the said river is starvation country, and an automatic close season affords the sheep a chance to recuperate. The Eskimo in the Endicott range occasionally capture a sheep by setting rope nooses or snares in the paths which the sheep make through the willow thickets while crossing from one side of a river valley to another. A few wolves are found on the sheep range, and I have seen wolf tracks following sheep's tracks high up into the mountains, so that probably a few are killed by Wolves.

At Flaxman Island Dr. Anderson and I talked over plans for the winter in detail. From a zoological point of view it seemed most important for him to go into the mountains south of Barter Island in search of the scientifically unknown mountain sheep, which would probably prove to be a variety of the Ovis dalli, and which, by native account, were fairly abundant. He would later on, if everything went well, go still farther south, beyond the mountains and the mountain sheep country, into the Yukon Valley, where he hoped to take some specimens of the also scientifically unknown caribou of northern Alaska. These plans of his eventuated very well. During the four months that intervened between this and our next meeting he secured numerous specimens of sheep, caribou, and other far northern mammals, and incidentally had his first experience of “living on the country.” In fact the caribou proved much more abun dant than we had hoped for; so abundant that had it not been for a shortage of tobacco, Dr. Anderson would have found considerable difficulty in inducing the Eskimo to leave the fleshpots and com fortable forest camps of the Yukon slope for the Arctic coast, where they could look forward to nothing better than living on the provisions we had purchased at Point Barrow; and living on “white men's grub ” is always a hardship to an Eskimo. It was, incidentally, Dr. Anderson's first experience of living without salt, an ordeal which he had much dreaded, for he shared the common belief that salt is a necessary article of diet. But it turned out, as I knew from experience it would, that he did not mind it seriously. 

Most people are in the habit of looking upon the articles of our accustomed diet, and especially upon salt, as necessities. We have not found them so. The longer you go without grain foods and vegetables the less you long for them. Salt I have found to behave like a narcotic poison —in other words, it is hard to break off its use, as it is hard to stop the use of tobacco; but after you have been a month or so without salt you cease to long for it, and after six months I have found the taste of meat boiled in salt water distinctly disagreeable. In the case of such a necessary element of food as fat, on the other hand, I have found that the longer you are without it the more you long for it, until the craving becomes much more intense than is the hunger of a man who fasts. (The symptoms of starvation are those of a disease rather than of being hungry.) Among the uncivilized Eskimo the dislike of salt is so strong that a saltiness imperceptible to me would prevent them from eating at all. This circumstance was often useful to me later in our travels about Coronation Gulf, for whenever our Eskimo visitors threatened to eat us out of house and home we could put in a little pinch of salt, and thus husband our resources without seeming inhospitable. A man who tasted anything salty at our table would quickly bethink him that he had plenty of more palatable fare in his own house.

We settled down to live with these Colville people, and commenced making preparations for the winter. The only thing to do was to catch fish. Now it seems that in Kotzebue Sound, where the Chris tian doctrines of the Colville people had originated, fishing is by nets only. As fishing is no doubt practically the only work done there, or was so before the development of mining, the missionary had probably said to them, “ Do not put out your fish-nets on Sunday," meaning thereby, “ Do not work on Sunday" — there being no other work. However that may be, the prohibition came to our community in the form : “ God has said you must not use fish-nets on Sunday. ” Accordingly the entire community pulled their fish-nets out of the river Saturday night, fished with hooks all day Sunday, and put the nets back into the water Monday morning.

The winter of 1908–09, while I was staying at the village of Cape Smythe, there arrived one Saturday about noon a man and his wife with a well- fed team of dogs and sled - load consisting partly of fresh caribou skins and caribou sinew, which latter has a high value on the north coast of Alaska as sewing- thread. Although this couple did not actually appear at the whaling station where I was staying, I learned about their coming immediately, for the news spread like wild - fire through the village that people had come who had caribou skins to sell. The couple said that they had spent the fall on the upper Colville River, had made a successful caribou hunt there, had stayed until all the meat was eaten up except what they could haul with them on their sled, and had then set out across country, heading northwest for Cape Smythe. This was the substance of what they told about their journeyings, until toward midnight, when they added the further detail that the man's sister and her husband had been with them on the upper Colville, that they had not succeeded so well in the caribou hunt, and that when they started, each family with its own sled, from the Colville, the sled of this second couple had been empty of meat. The family who had plenty had with great generosity fed the family which had none, but had refused to give any meat to their dogs, with the result that the poor animals became nothing but skin and bones. Then a severe blizzard struck them, and all the hungry dogs froze to death, while of course nothing happened to the well- fed dog team. When the one couple had no dogs with which to haul their sled, the other could no longer wait for them and had abandoned them about forty miles southeast from Cape Smythe. 

The people who had been abandoned had some relatives in the Cape Smythe village, and even apart from them there were many who were ready to go to the rescue. The relief party was about to set out when someone pointed out that Saturday was just merging into Sunday and that no work must be done on the Sabbath. 

Strangely enough, none of the white men at Cape Smythe heard anything of the abandoned couple, although we learned later that their case had been a topic of continuous conversation all day Sunday. The first any white man knew of it was after Dr. Marsh had conducted the regular evening services in the church, when he found, very much to his surprise, that the people after the service did not leave the church as usual and go to their homes. When he asked them why this was, they replied that they were waiting for Sunday to be over so that they could start out to the rescue of a starving couple that had been abandoned inland. When Dr. Marsh knew about the case he of course did all he could to hurry things up, but it was already midnight when the searchers got started. The weather had been fine on Saturday, and there would that day have been no trouble in following the trail of the couple who had arrived, but by Sunday night the wind had been blowing and the drifting snow had covered up the trail. The search party was out two days, but returned to Cape Smythe without finding any one. 

A day or two after this, Thomas Gordon, who was living about three miles northeast of Cape Smythe, heard a faint noise outside his front door. He thought nothing of it at first, but a little later someone accidentally went out and found an Eskimo who had collapsed and fainted on the front-door step. When this man had been revived in the warmth of the house, it turned out that he was the man of the couple abandoned. Mr. Gordon sent a sled on the man's trail, and they soon found his wife encamped in a fireless hut, with her hands and feet slightly but not seriously frozen. Half a dozen hours later she would no doubt have been maimed for life. 

While I was in the Cape Smythe village, I never saw the man who had abandoned his sister and her husband to starve and freeze, but it happened a month or two later that my party was storm-bound on the southeast corner of Smith Bay, at the house of an old acquaintance of ours named Kunagrak, who was related to all the people concerned. The man who had done the abandoning happened to be staying with Kunagrak. I noticed that when we sat down to meals it was he who said grace; in spiritual matters he seemed to be an authority and the leading light of the place. As a matter of curiosity I asked him if he had been long a Christian, and he replied, “ About ten years. ” He further volunteered the information that during all that time he had never eaten a meal without saying grace, and had never worked on Sunday, and had kept all the commandments of the Lord. I asked him if he had never heard that to abandon people to starve was against the commandments of the Lord. He had never heard that particular commandment, he said; but that might be because his Christianity had come entirely from some Kotzebue Sound Eskimo. He had never had the advantage of the direct instruction of a white missionary, and no doubt he might not have heard all the commandments of which those might have knowledge who had been better instructed than he. Just as a man who sits down to a meal of mountain sheep will adopt quickly a food taboo of which he is informed by any one who happens to be present, so this man seemed glad to learn that abandoning people to starve was against the desire of the Lord, and he would make a point of seeing that it did not happen again.

Castor canadensis Kuhl. Canadian Beaver. Ki'gi-ak (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

I saw specimens taken in the east branch of the Mackenzie delta , nearly as far north as the tree line , and also near the mouth of Peel River. The Eskimo consider the broad, flat tail of the Beaver a great delicacy; it is somewhat fatty, and when boiled has a soft, gelatinous structure. Mr. Joseph Hodgson says that the Beaver have greatly extended their range east of the Mackenzie during recent years, in the region around Great Bear Lake.

On April 22d we reached our meat cache at Oliktok , to find, as we had feared , that Kunaluk's party and Akpek's had been there more than two weeks ahead of us. They had gone at the matter energetically and between them and their dogs they had, about four days before we arrived, so nearly finished our provisions that they were able to load the rest on their sleds and carry it off with them. Akpek had stayed behind, however, and it was only Kunaluk and his son-in-law with their two sleds who were concerned in the direct theft of our provisions, for in that country one does not consider it a theft to merely camp beside a food cache and eat it up. 

Besides the meat there had been cached here fifty pounds of rice which belonged to Kunaluk. In the fall I had tried to buy this sack of rice from Mr. Leffingwell, but he felt that he had to give some white men's provisions to poor Kunaluk, who was working for him. I had told Leffingwell that Kunaluk would not appreciate the rice, but of this he had remained unconvinced. I now felt in a measure repaid for the loss of my caribou meat through learning, from Akpek, that Kunaluk had fed the entire fifty pounds of rice to his dogs while he himself and his family lived on my deer meat, which showed precisely how much he thought of the rice that would have been nearly priceless to us. I could now, when I saw him next, tell Leffingwell exactly how much “poor Kunaluk,” who “must have some white men's food for a delicacy now and then," valued the delicacy when he had it .