64 CONSERVATION OF CANADIAN WILD LIFE 
food, with all their experience of the caribou are sometimes 
unable to find them where they might be expected, with 
the result that distress and starvation follow. 
Economic Value of Caribou.—In an earlier chapter the 
value of the caribou as a source of meat was discussed. 
Perhaps no native wild animal is economically so important 
and generally useful as the barren-ground caribou. With- 
out it enormous areas of our northern territory would be- 
come practically uninhabitable. It supplies the Indians 
and Eskimos with almost all the necessaries of life: food, 
clothing, shelter, and means to trade at the trading-post. 
An excellent description of the utilization of the caribou by 
the Indians is given by Warburton Pike. Describing the 
Indians’ departure to the hunting-ground, he says:* 
He leaves the trading-post, after one of his yearly visits, with a supply 
of ammunition, tea, and tobacco, a blanket or two, and, if he has made 
a good season’s hunt, is perhaps lucky enough to have taken one of the 
Company’s duffel capotes (about the best form of greatcoat I have ever 
seen). He has a wife and family waiting for him somewhere on the shore 
of the big lake where fish are plentiful, expecting a gaudy dress, a shawl, 
or a string of beads from the fort, but relying entirely on the caribou for 
maintenance during the awful cold of the coming winter. The journey 
up till they fall in with the caribou is usually full of hardships, but once 
they have reached the hunting-ground and found game a great improve- 
ment in affairs takes place; the hunter is busy killing, while the women 
dry meat and make grease, dress the skins for moccasins, mittens, and 
gun-covers, and cut babiche, which takes the place of string for lacing 
snow-shoes and many other purposes. For the hair coats, which every- 
* Loc. cit., pp. 49-50. 
+ The following extract indicates one of the methods of hunting and kill- 
ing without rifles: 
Sergeant A. H. Joy, writing on 18 Feb., 1918, states: 
“T had a conversation with a Caribou-eater Indian during the former part 
of this winter and he told me that the band with whom he lived very seldom 
used guns to kill the caribou between the end of July and the middle of Sep- 
tember, as the caribou came through the country so thick that they could 
crowd them into the lakes and rivers and on the lake shores and kill them 
with sticks and axes, and on these occasions the animals are slaughtered in 
hundreds.” 
