216 FOUR YEARS IN THE WHITE NORTH [Feb. 



to the plateau, where he discovered two caribou. They 

 were the first he had ever seen and they more than 

 attracted his attention. He declared afterward that 

 buck fever was a kind of paralysis. That he was not 

 wholly affected is shown by the fact that he shot both 

 of them. 



Laying aside his rifle, he walked toward the edge of 

 the cliff, and within a few minutes found himself face 

 to face with three more. By this time he was consider- 

 ably excited, and arrived at the house quite out of 

 breath. He and Panikpa started back at once, without 

 their rifles, with the intention of shooting the bodies 

 down the 1,000-foot slope to the sea ice, where I would 

 be stationed with the dog-team. Two hundred yards 

 from the house four more caribou popped around a cor- 

 ner only a few yards away. Jot arrived at the house 

 wild-eyed, shouting that the country was crawling with 

 caribou ! 



Because of deep snows covering their feeding-grounds 

 between Etah and the Humboldt Glacier, the herd was 

 evidently migrating south along the shore in search of 

 various lichens, ground- willow, grass, and moss. Many 

 were killed in our vicinity within the next six weeks; 

 they were all small, the heaviest weighing only 120 

 pounds. 



This is not the white caribou (Rangifer pearyi) which 

 we had killed on the northern shores of Axel Heiberg 

 Land in 1914, but a variety of the European {Rangifer 

 grosnlandicus) , once existing in vast numbers from the 

 Humboldt Glacier, latitude 79° 10', throughout the 

 whole stretch of coast-line southward to Cape Farewell, 

 latitude 59° 49'. 



Formerly hunted with bow and arrow and even with 



