8 NEWFOUNDLAND CARIBOU 



records in the way of drawings to show us how thoroughly 

 famiHar he was with the animal. From the drawings on bone 

 we learn much that the valuable fossil fails to show, for the 

 ancient cave man gives us a picture, wonderfully well 

 done, of what might well be a Newfoundland Caribou of 

 to-day. These drawings, together with the many fossil 

 remains, are indisputable evidence of the reindeer's existence 

 in the earlier ages when the world was not as the world we 

 know to-day, when climate as well as land areas were entirely 

 different, when stranger beasts than we now see roamed the 

 land and fought against conditions which were slowly changing 

 and slowly developing. When the great continents were 

 formed and gradually separated from one another by water or 

 perpetual ice, the original reindeer were split up into 

 different herds which took possession of the slowly-forming 

 continents, and by this geographical change they have developed 

 along slightly different lines, so that now instead of one 

 species, we have, or think we have, a great many. But we 

 will leave this subject till later on, for the Newfoundland 

 Caribou is what we are after and with those alone shall we 

 deal in this chapter. We will not for the present even discuss 

 whether or not it is a separate species, because to do so 

 would bring in the other races of the family which we pro- 

 pose to leave alone. 



At the great risk of being called to account by some of 

 my friends, I shall begin by saying that the Newfoundland 

 stag, at its best, is perhaps the handsomest of all the Caribou, 

 even though he is not the largest and does not carry the 

 longest horns. Not only is he a thoroughly handsome 

 creature, but his life is unusually full of interest, to be fully 

 appreciated only by those who have had the good fortune to 

 spend many months in the wilds of his island home, seeing 

 him and his soft-eyed does under many and varied conditions. 



