ARCTIC GAME NOTES 11 



southeast of Darnley Bay. The Indians have within the past four or five 

 years practically exterminated the species around the east end of Great Bear 

 Lake, and from all the information we could get from the Coronation Gulf 

 Eskimo, musk oxen are seldom if ever seen near the mainland coast less than 

 seventy-five miles east of the mouth of the Coppermine River. The musk 

 oxen are so readily killed, often to the last animal in a herd, that the species 

 cannot hold its own against even the most primitive weapons, and the 

 advent of modern rifles means speedy extermination. 



In Arctic Alaska, the white mountain sheep (Ovis dalli) is undoubtedly 

 fast diminishing in numbers. The sheep probably never ranged east of the 

 Mackenzie although they are said to be fairly common in the mountains on 

 the west side of the river from Fort Norman to the west side of the delta. 

 The Endicott Mountains or that branch of the northern Rockies which runs 

 noithwest from the western edge of the Mackenzie delta, form a divide ten 

 or fifteen miles from the coast west of Herschel Island and seventy-five or 

 one hundred miles from the coast at the Colville, the largest river flowing 

 into the Arctic in northern Alaska. Sheep were formerly quite numerous 

 at the heads of nearly all the rivers on the Arctic side of the divide, at least 

 as far west as the Colville. It is probable that until comparatively recent 

 times, before whaling ships began to winter at Herschel Island in 1889, the 

 sheep were not much hunted in this region. The caribou were larger, more 

 abundant and more easily taken. The gradual extermination of the cari- 

 bou in northwestern Alaska, combined with other causes, has for many 

 years sent family after family of Eskimo from the rivers in the Kotzebue 

 Sound region across to the Colville River, at the same time that many 

 Colville Eskimo have gradually moved eastward, occupying one mountain 

 river valley after another until the sheep became too scarce to support 

 them. Many of these Eskimo then gave up sheep-hunting and moved 

 into the Mackenzie delta or to Point Barrow. 



In my sheep-hunting expedition of October, 1908, along the Hula-hula 

 River, which has a course of about forty-five miles in the mountains, I met 

 two Eskimo families of five each and hunted with them until December. 

 We crossed the divide over a pass not known to have been crossed by a white 

 man before and spent the midwinter season hunting caribou on the south 

 side of the mountains along a branch of the Chandlar River, a tributary of 

 the Yukon. Returning in February we spent several weeks more with the 

 sheep-hunters on the north slope. Sheep seemed to be much more common 

 on the north side of the divide than on the south side, although the south side 

 is an uninhabited wilderness. 



One of the Hula-hula sheep-hunters, Kunagnanna, had in this small 

 river valley killed thirty or thirty-five sheep from June to August, 190S, 

 and thirty-seven from September, 1908 to May, 1909, subsisting with his 

 whole family on sheep. He had come originally from the head of Kotzebue 



