Caribou 201 



The speed of the Caribou when swimming is so great that swim- 

 it takes the best of canoe-men to overtake a vigorous buck. A powers 

 good canoeist is supposed to paddle about 5 miles an hour; so 

 the Caribou may attain 4 for a short distance, though ordinarily 

 its speed is little over 2. There are many kinds of woodland 

 and rough country over which the animal cannot travel afoot 

 so fast as this. What wonder, then, that it is so ready to take 

 to the water on every occasion. 



In Keewatin, W. R. Hine had interesting evidence of this. 

 At many places he saw where, on coming to some rocky bluff 

 over a lake, they had unhesitatingly toboganned down, caring 

 nothing so long as they plumped into deep water at the bottom. 



An animal with such powers and gifts is indifferent to the 

 elements and superior to space. It dwells, moreover, in a 

 country where man is rare and where its food is in measureless 

 abundance. Thus it has little to dread from man or beast, 

 and nothing from hunger or climate, the deadly enemies of 

 most wild creatures. 



What, then, has it to fear .? Why have not its numbers enemies 

 reached the limit of its food-supply ? Probably because it has 

 countless irresistible deadly foes in the insect world. 



All through the summer the herds are harassed by clouds 

 of mosquitoes that drive them to seek the open, where they are 

 subject to the attacks of several kinds of verra-fly, or gad-fly. 



TION 



There is little doubt that the well-known migrations of the ^^^^gra- 

 Caribou may be explained by a consideration of these insect 

 clouds at one season in conjunction with deep snow at another; 

 the latter by hiding their food in winter, and thus driving them 

 into the woods; the insect hordes, by forcing them back again 

 in spring to the partial solace of the kindly breezes that fan 

 them in the open or on the highest levels of the nearest moun- 

 tains. 



In one sense all the Deer are migratory. The Moose may 

 migrate only 5 or 10 miles from the low swamps in summer to 

 the hardwood ridges in winter; the Blacktail of the mountains 

 may descend from the high hill-tops of its summer range to 



