22 NEWFOUNDLAND CARIBOU 



did not learn of the existence of Caribou from the natives, 

 the Beothic Indians, must remain a mystery. There is no 

 doubt that they had more or less frequent dealings with 

 these Indians during the sixteenth century, for even as early 

 as the year 1502, three of these Indians were taken across 

 the Atlantic and exhibited before the English king. This 

 leads us to wonder whether the Indians used Caribou skins 

 for wearing apparel, and if they did how it was that the 

 curiosity of the white men did not prompt them to discover 

 the animals which supplied those skins. 



Let us return to the Caribou of to-day. We have seen 

 them during the summer period of their existence. As the 

 days shorten and the nights grow colder, the Second Period 

 or season is reached and the animals attain their highest 

 development. The does have grown fat, for after the main 

 pest of flies has passed they can feed more comfortably, free 

 from the constant irritation caused by their tormentors. 

 The young are well grown and strong, and able to take care 

 of themselves under ordinary conditions, though they still stay 

 by their mothers. They have learned the laws of the wilds, 

 not by being taught by their mothers, as some fanciful writers 

 would have us believe, but by the instinct and sense with 

 which Nature endowed them. Some of the stories written 

 during recent years are so childishly foolish that one is lost 

 in astonishment, not only at the absurdity of the writers, 

 but at the deluded public which reads and sometimes 

 believes even the most far-fetched accounts of the schooling 

 of the wild creatures. When a supposedly sane man says 

 that he watched a Caribou doe teaching its fawn to jump a 

 fallen log, we almost expect to hear that they have a written 

 language, and have to struggle with the " three R's." The 

 young Caribou learns to jump with the same ease and lack 

 of consciousness as it learns to walk and run, it will jump 



