Man The Fat Hunter

By the beginning of March Dr. Anderson and Pikaluk were so completely recovered that they volunteered to make the six days' trip south to Langton Bay for the purpose of depositing there the sled load of ammunition and other necessities. It was our intention then, by the 10th of March to proceed inland from Langton Bay where we had wintered and to strike across country thence to the northeast corner of Bear Lake, with the purpose of thereafter working north in the summer down the Coppermine River until we should meet Eskimo. We know now that this would not have been a good plan to follow; it was made impractical by the arrival, March 6th, of Ilavinirk and others of the inland party. 

Ilavinirk's party told a tale of hardships and starvation rather worse than anything through which we had been previously. It had taken Natkusiak and Palaiyak a long time to reach them with the sled load of blubber. I had explained to Natkusiak when he started from Cape Parry that there was every need for hurry, for Ilavinirk's and Memoranna's parties had had practically nothing to eat when I left them. But Natkusiak could not realize that there was any real danger, and I do not think that there would have been any danger had Natkusiak been in Ilavinirk’s place. As it was, however, instead of hurrying, Natkusiak stopped here and there on the way, in one place to catch fish because he had been so long without fish. and in another place to set traps because the trapping was good. Meantime Ilavinirk's and Memoranna's parties had had hard luck in hunting. There were caribou in the country. but the weather was continually bad and their management was not the best. The little food left on hand when I went away soon disappeared, and then followed the larger zoological specimens which I had preserved for Dr. Anderson in the fall. There were nine skins of caribou of both sexes and all ages, which I had taken off carefully with heads, horns, and leg bones, making also careful record of the measurements. These specimens were of great scientific value, for they represented in all probability a new variety of caribou, or if not that, at least caribou from a district where none had previously been taken for scientific purposes. One of these specimens especially was a rare thing. I have been present at the killing of a thousand caribou, and in all that number I have seen only three that were hornless in a season when they should have had horns. In other words, I have seen only three caribou upon the heads of which horns were destined never to grow. One of these I had carefully skinned for Dr. Anderson. In this period of scarcity the head of this rare muley caribou went for food along with the other scientific skins. The heads of all these animals and the leg bones went first and then the skins themselves, as well as other skins which we had intended for clothing. 

It was a period of scarcity not only among the human beings of that district but also among the wolves, all of which were skin poor and two of which died of starvation near our house at a place where their carcasses were found afterwards and eaten by our Eskimo. Pannigabluk was the only member of our party to whom wolf meat was taboo. The rest of us considered wolf, under ordinary circumstances, to be excellent eating. In summer when they are fat and caribou poor, all of us much preferred wolf meat to caribou. But those who tasted them were unanimous in saying that the wolves that died of starvation were no delicacy. 

When Natkusiak finally arrived at the camp on Horton River, the tide had just been turned by Memoranna's success in caribou hunting. From that time everything had gone well, but the two periods of starvation in one winter, which were the first of his entire life, had proved too much for Ilavinirk and his family, for they now came to me and told me that they felt sure that if we went farther east the coming spring, things would go still worse with them. In fact, they would not go east with me and had made up their minds to quit our service and go back to the Mackenzie River, where there was plenty of fish. where tea and tobacco could be had. and where they could attend church service now and then.

It was March 14th that Dr. Anderson left for the west, accompanying Memoranna. We who remained behind at Okat kept on fishing for a day or two after that in the same routine way; and then it occurred to me that it was worth while to look for caribou to the east, for while tomcod are excellent eating when there is nothing else to be had, they are not quite so good as the next poorest kind of thing when there is any choice. Following their natural bent, my companions considered such a thing as looking for caribou here ridiculous, for they had never heard any one say that caribou had ever been seen in this neighborhood.

This evening was one of the most difficult of my entire expe rience on account of the levelness of the country. Our house stood on an island with a cutbank about a quarter of a mile long and so I knew that if I could hit the neighborhood of the house within an area of not more than a quarter of a mile, there was a fair chance of finding the camp. It was chiefly a chance, no doubt, but as a matter of fact I found the cutbank and got home about four hours after dark, much to the surprise of the Eskimo and also to their delight, seeing that I brought a caribou tongue, which was not only a deli cacy but also an advertisement of the fact that the reign of the tom cod was over . Two days later we moved camp about ten miles southeast to the east end of Langton Bay, from which we hunted caribou with such success that within a week we had seventeen carcasses piled up outside our tent. 

On one of his caribou hunts from this camp, Natkusiak was caught by just such a blizzard as that in which I had been about a week before, and was awayfortwodays. A man fully dressed at this season of the year wears two coats, a thick outer one and an inner one made of thin fawnskin. Natkusiak on this occasion was wearing only the thin fawnskin one, and we were therefore consider ably worried about him; but on the third morning he came home all safe and smiling, saying that he had had the longest and best sleep of the winter. He had been about four miles away from camp, in a little snow hut, the floor of which was not over five feet in diameter and the roof of which was less than four feet high. 

During this time we had good success, not only with caribou but also in the trapping of foxes, the skins of which were valuable both commercially and for scientific purposes. As always at this season of the year, and during other seasons whenever the caribou are poor, we preferred the meat of the foxes to that of the caribou. I find a note in my diary to the effect that we ate all the foxes caught during this time, except one which we found dead from disease, apparently, and there is a complaint set down to the effect that although the skin was in good condition, the flesh was too lean for eating.

We had with us on starting from Langton Bay about two weeks' supplies. These were neither here nor there as provisions for a year's exploration we would have been quite as well off had we started with only two days' supplies. From the outset, therefore, we tried to provide each day food for that day from the animals of the land. In carrying out such a programme for a party of four each bad to do his share. My main reliance was the Alaskan man Natkusiak , and the woman Pannigabluk; the Mackenzie River boy Tannaumirk, a boy in character, though perhaps twenty-five in years, was a cheerful and companionable sort of fellow, but with out initiative and (like many of his countrymen nowadays) not in the best of health. Our general plan was that the three Eskimo took care of the sled, one, usually the woman, walking ahead to pick out a trail through the rough sea ice, and the other two steadying the sled from upsetting too often, and pulling in harness at the same time to help the dogs. If they saw a seal or a bear, one of them would go after him while the other two waited at the sled, cooked a lunch if it was near midday, or made camp if night was approaching. If by camp-time no game had yet been seen, the woman Pannigabluk would stay by the camp to cook supper, while the two men went off in different directions to hunt. That the two should go in different directions was wise, for it doubled the chances of seeing game, but it at times caused unnecessary waste of ammunition and the killing of more meat than was needed. The very first time that both men went out to hunt in this manner, for instance, Natkusiak killed two seven or eight hundred pound bearded seals in one shot, and Tannaumirk a big, fat grizzly bear in four shots. This was meat enough for several weeks if we had (Eskimo fashion) stayed there to eat it up; traveling as we were, heavily loaded through rough ice, we could not take along more than a hundred pounds of meat. 

Although the Eskimo frequently killed an animal or two if they happened on them along the line of march, their chief business was getting the sled load as many miles ahead as convenient during the day, which was seldom over fifteen miles in a working day averaging perhaps eight hours. We were in no hurry, for we had no particular distance to go and no reason to hasten back, but expected to spend the summer wherever it overtook us, and the winter similarly in its turn. 

My companions traveled along the coast, made camp, and cooked, while I took upon myself the main burden of the food-providing. With this in view I used to strike inland about five miles in the morning, starting often a good while before the Eskimo broke camp, and then walking rapidly eastward parallel to the coast. With my snow-shoes I made easy and rapid progress compared to that of the sled along the coast, unless I happened on caribou. These had been in some numbers on the Parry peninsula before we left home. (We called the Langton Bay and Cape Parry district “home” for three years, for, no matter how many hundreds of miles of land and ice separated Dr. Anderson or me from it, we always had at least one Eskimo family there protecting what supplies we had and the scien tific collections already made.) Crossing Darnley Bay on the ice, we had of course seen no caribou; at Cape Lyon the Eskimo saw one yearling, but were unable to get it; and at Point Pierce, five days out from Langton Bay, we were stopped by an easterly blizzard without having yet secured any. The Eskimo, who had “known” all along that we were going into a gameless country, felt sure that the fawn they had seen at Lyon was the most easterly member of the deer species inhabiting the coast; it would, therefore, be wisdom to turn about now, they argued, before the road got too long for the back journey and we got too weak from hunger all this over huge troughs of boiled meat and raw blubber of the seals killed two days before, on which we were gorging ourselves, for much eating was always our chief pastime when delayed by a blizzard that the dogs would not face. As a matter of fact, what my Eskimo really dreaded was not so much hunger as the possibility of our success in the quest of what to me were the scientifically interesting “people who had never seen a white man,” but to them were the dreaded “Nagyuk togmiut, so called because they hook to themselves wives with the antlers of bull caribou; they kill all strangers.” Generally it is only in times of extreme need that one hunts caribou in a blizzard not that nine tenths of the blizzards in the Arctic need keep a healthy man indoors ; it is merely that the drift ing snow (even when you can see as far as two hundred yards) di minishes many times over the chance you have of finding game. If you do find caribou , however, the stronger the gale the better your chance of close approach without being seen, for these animals, though they double their watchfulness in foggy weather, seem to relax it in blizzard . In the present instance my reason for looking for caribou was that I wanted to kill a few for the moral effect it would have on my party; for in the midst of abundance they would be forced to fall back on their fear of the Nagyuktogmiut as the only argu ment for retreat, and this they were a bit ashamed of doing, even among themselves. It was therefore great luck for us, although we were in no immediate need of meat, that after a short hunt through the storm I ran into a band of seven cows and young bulls about five miles inland, southwest from Point Pierce. I came upon them quite without cover, but saw them through the drifting snow at three hundred yards before they saw me — the human eye is a great deal keener than that of the caribou , wolf, or any other animal with which I have had experience. By stepping back a few paces till the drifting snow had hidden the caribou again, and then guardedly circling them to leeward, I found a slight ridge which allowed safe approach to within about two hundred yards of where they had been. The main thing in stalking caribou that are not moving is the ability to keep in mind their location accurately while you are circling and winding about so as to approach them from a new direction behind cover of irregular hills and ridges that are of course unfamiliar to you. In this case my plans came suddenly to naught through the caribou appearing on the sky-line two hundred yards off. I shot three of them, though we could not possibly use more than the meat of one. The moral effect on my Eskimo of having food to throw away would, I knew, be invaluable to me. Had I killed only one, they would not have believed it to be for any reason other than that I was unable to kill more. This was the only time in a period of fourteen months of continuous "living on the country” that I shot more animals than I thought we should need, although I often had to kill a single large animal, such as a polar bear or bearded seal, when I knew we should be unable to haul with us more than a small part of its meat.

The land showed nothing but a white wolf or arctic fox now and then; ptarmigan there were, but they are too small game for a party of four that is going to go a year on nine hundred and sixty rounds of ammunition ; the foxes, too, were beneath our notice, though their meat is excellent; but a wolf that came within two hundred yards seldom got by me, for a fat one weighs a hundred pounds, and all of us preferred them at this season to caribou, except Pannigabluk, who would not taste the meat because it is taboo to her people.

Rangifer arcticus (Richardsons). Barren Ground Caribou. " Tûk'tū ” (universal Eskimo name).

Adult bull, Pag'nirk. Adult female, Kūl'la -vŭk. Fawn, Nö'wak.

With the possible exception of the Bowhead Whale, the Caribou is without doubt the most important animal of the Arctic. There is scarcely anything manufactured which can equal Caribou skin as an article of clothing; in many districts the natives live for long periods almost exclusively upon the meat of the Caribou, while there are many vast sections of the land which could with difficulty even be explored without relying upon finding the herds of Caribou. The Caribou were formerly universally and abundantly distributed over all parts of Arctic Alaska and Canada, but the numbers have been enormously decreased nearly everywhere within the last twenty years. Until a few years ago the coastal plain of Arctic Alaska, from Point Barrow to the Mackenzie, was the pasture of vast herds. Only an occasional scattered band is now seen. As a consequence most of the Eskimo have been compelled by starvation to move out, notably from the Colville River region. The Caribou are practically extinct around Point Barrow, and our party in the year 1908-1909 found only a few between Cape Halkett and the Colville. We saw a herd of perhaps four hundred in the Kuparuk River delta (the only large band seen by anybody in northern Alaska that season) and other small bands as far west as Demarcation Point. Around the mouth of the Mackenzie the Caribou have practically disappeared, although stragglers are occasionally seen on Richard Island and in the Eskimo Lakes region. Few are now found on the Cape Bathurst peninsula, and only small numbers around Langton Bay and Darnley Bay. There are places in the interior of Alaska which are more favored. In the southern foothills on the Endicott Mountains, on one of the northern tributaries of the Yukon, beyond the ordinary range of the Indians or the white prospectors, I saw in 1908 as many as one thousand Caribou in a single herd. Farther east, the Caribou are much more plentiful. Victoria Island pastures great numbers in summer. These herds cross to the mainland south of Victoria Island as soon as Dolphin and Union Straits and Coronation Gulf are frozen over in the fall (in 1910, about November 8th - 10th ), returning north over the ice in April and May. Some Caribou are found all summer around Great Bear Lake and the Coppermine River. Large numbers winter on Caribou Point, the large peninsula between Dease Bay and Mc Tavish Bay at the eastern end of Great Bear Lake. Here on the cold, calm days of midwinter the steam from the massed herds often rises like a cloud over the tops of the scattering spruce forests. Although a large number of Caribou come down into the Bear Lake woods, and go out on the Barren Grounds in spring, not all the Caribou seek the shelter of the woods in winter. Some Caribou are found in midwinter on the most wind-swept barrens and occur on almost any part of the Arctic coast at any season of the year. 

The Eskimo of the Coronation Gulf and Victoria Island region have no firearms and kill Caribou by driving a herd between long rows of rock monuments into an ambush or into lakes where the Caribou are pursued and speared from kayaks. Two or three stones or a bunch of turf placed on top of a rock two or three feet high, or even less, to resemble persons, form these little cairns, often extending for miles and converging in some valley or gulch. The Caribou ordinarily pay no attention to these monuments, but when alarmed by the sight of people, seem to become confused and do not venture to cross the lines of mounds. The custom is to have a person stationed here and there along the line, while others surround the herd of Caribou and start it moving towards the line. As the Caribou approach, the people along the line of rock monuments display themselves, throwing the herd into a panic and as the herd rushes along between the converging lines into the ambush where concealed bowmen have an opportunity to shoot the Caribou at very short range. On the Barren Grounds around Coronation Gulf these inuktjuit (inuk [man ] -like) Caribou drives are found everywhere. But even in this most favorable Caribou country the older people say that in their youth the Caribou were much more abundant than at present. 

The hunting of the Barren Ground Caribou, as it is practiced by white men and the Eskimo who use firearms, is in theory a very simple matter. The prime requisites are unlimited patience and much hard work. The field -glass or telescope is almost as necessary as the rifle, since the Caribou should be discovered at a distance. The herd is spied out from the highest knolls or elevations, and if the country is rough enough to afford even a little cover, the approach is comparatively easy by hunting up the wind, as the Caribou do not see very far. Their powers of scent and hearing are very acute, however. On a broad, flat tundra plain, where there is no cover, and there are not enough hunters to approach from several sides, obviously the proper thing to do is to wait for the Caribou to browse slowly along and move on to more favorable ground for stalking. During the short days of winter this is often impossible and under any circumstances is trying to the patience. The reputed superiority of the Eskimo hunter over his white confrère seems to be mainly in the former's willingness to spend unlimited time in approaching his quarry. The Great Bear Lake Indians often take advantage of the Caribou's frequent habit of circling around the hunter until certain of the danger. They will sneak up as far as practicable, then come out into the open and run directly at the Caribou, which often stand stupidly until the hunter is very near or else circle blindly around until they get the scent of the hunter and make off. I have always found it much easier to approach a small herd than a large one, because there is always a straggler or two on the flanks of a large herd to give alarm before the main body is approached. 

For the purposes of making clothing, the skins of the Caribou are at their best from the 1st of August until about the 10th of September. Later than that the hair becomes too long and heavy. Towards the end of winter the hair begins to get loose, and by the last of April is so very loose that the skin is practically worthless. During June and July the Caribou usually have a more or less patchy appearance, due to bunches of loose, faded, old hair remaining in places. Summer skins are often badly perforated by the grubs of a species of bot- fly. Caribou skins are exceptional non -conductors of heat. When a number of Caribou are killed during the short days of mid winter, the Eskimo often skin only the legs, double the legs under the body, and pack soft snow around the carcass. I have seen many Caribou left out overnight at a temperature of —45° Fahrenheit, and lower, and the heat retained by the skin so that the body was warm and readily skinned the next day. 

The fawns, seldom more than one in number, are born between the 1st and 15th of June. Two young fawns taken near the Colville delta, Alaska, June 16th, 1909, were quite different in color, one being decidedly brown, with short, sleek coat; the other was whitish gray with very little " fawn ” color, and hair longer and softer, more woolly in texture. No traces of spotting on either specimen. The Caribou seen east of the Coppermine River and on the south side of Coronation Gulf seemed to average much lighter in color than the Caribou found on Great Bear Lake or on the Arctic coast west of Cape Parry. With very few exceptions the Coppermine Caribou were very light, with legs nearly white. The heads of these Caribou appeared to be much shorter than those of the Great Bear Lake Caribou, with a noticeable fullness or convexity between forehead and nose, reminding one in some degree of the profile of a rabbit. The difference is not very noticeable on the skulls, the fullness of the face being largely due to the fuzziness of the whorl of hair on front of face. 

The old bull Caribou begin to shed their antlers by the first of January or earlier, and most of them have dropped them by the month of February. The young bulls and cows retain their antlers until May. On Caribou Point the old bulls herded together in winter, and in their antler-less condition presented a pitiably tame and defense-less appearance, in contrast to the bull Caribou’s belligerent-looking autumn attitude. By the 10th of May the new antlers of the old bulls are about a foot long, with blunt, knobby ends. 

Many Eskimo claim to be able to pick out the fat Caribou from a herd by observing the shape of the horns. This is probably merely the ability to distinguish between the sexes in a herd at the different At Great Bear Lake in the fall, before the rutting season, the old bulls had the greatest quantities of fat. In midwinter all the bulls were poor, while the cows often had considerable fat. Towards spring the young bulls began to pick up a little fat, while the cows seemed to fall away as the calving season approached. The cows can usually be distinguished from young bulls by the relative slenderness of their antlers. Old bulls seldom have much fat before the end of the mosquito season. When the antlers are full grown, then they begin to pick up rapidly. The largest slab of back-fat which I have seen taken from a Caribou on the Arctic coast was from a bull killed near Langton Bay early in September, the fat weighing 39 pounds. seasons. A large bull killed by Mr. Stefansson on Dease River in October had back-fat 72 mm. in thickness (2 inches). Comparing the thickness of this with the Langton Bay specimen, the back-fat of the Dease River bull must have weighed at least 50 pounds. The thicker the back-fat of a Caribou is, the richer it is in proportion —the amount of connective tissue remaining the same, and the additional weight consisting of interstitial fat.