230 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



the mainland, who rush up to a band of caribou at top speed, hop- 

 ing to get within shooting range before they begin to run, and hoping 

 also that because of their peculiar antics the caribou will be con- 

 vinced at once that they are not wolves, and will circle to get a 

 better look or to get to leeward to prove it by the sense of smell. 

 I have often seen this method used by Indians and never with 

 great success. They may get one or two out of a band or they 

 may get none, and their stories of occasionally killing whole bands 

 I have never verified, nor has any one on whom I thoroughly rely. 

 But by more common-sense methods, one can usually get every 

 animal of a band of six or eight. In a country where game is 

 scarce, as it is in nearly every region where I have hunted, it is 

 necessary to kill a majority of the animals seen, and I long ago 

 discarded the haphazard methods of the Indian, which too often 

 leave you hungry and empty-handed after several hours to begin the 

 hunt all over again. 



The caribou grazed in the center of their bowl from half-past 

 eleven that night until about three in the morning. They then lay 

 down for an hour, and about four o'clock commenced grazing 

 slowly in a direction directly away from me. What I had to do 

 was to move a little farther off, till at something over half a mile 

 I was sure they could not see me. Then I circled to be directly in 

 front of them and lay for about an hour motionless till they were 

 within two or three hundred yards, when I shot all six in eight shots. 



The work of skinning and dismembering took some time and it 

 was an eight-mile walk home, so that by the time I arrived at camp 

 the men had had a good night's sleep and were up and ready to cook 

 breakfast. Only they had nothing to cook. They knew it was one 

 of my most firmly adhered-to rules that on any long trip where am- 

 munition has to be husbanded, no animal smaller than a wolf shall 

 be killed. They had been discussing how good the geese on the 

 hillside would taste, and wondering whether I might not be willing 

 to make an exception in this case and allow the landing to be cele- 

 brated with a goose or two. They had even come to a decision, 

 and one of our proudest traditions might easily have been shat- 

 tered by the expenditure of a bullet for five pounds of meat when 

 it should have brought one hundred. But the tradition was saved 

 by my arrival with six caribou tongues for a preliminary break- 

 fast, and the announcement that by moving seven miles we could 

 camp in the vicinity of the deer-kill with driftwood enough to cook 

 two or three successive meals of boiled caribou heads. 



When we got ashore Storkerson and I had a real feast of boiled 



