Zoological Explorations. 237 



Imagine a perfectly flat region covered with a dense forest of 

 dead conifers, which have fallen over each other in a perfect 

 maze, here piled up and there scattered as if by a cyclone 

 among the still numerous standing trees. Imagine a thick 

 growth of wiry bushes and rank grass to have interlaced itself 

 with the fallen tree tops, stumps and trunks, the ground being 

 covered with standinsf water from six inches to three or four 

 feet deep. Such is the muskeg, a country offering almost 

 insurmountable difficulties to the explorer or hunter. The 

 inanimate obstacles are bad enough, but when dense clouds 

 of vicious mosquitoes, swarms of "black flies," and hordes of 

 immense horse-flies, called "bull dogs," are added, it will be 

 seen that naturalizing in such a region is no holiday sport. 

 The stoutest clothes are torn to tatters after a few hours of 

 plunging through the half submerged bushes and snags, 

 the stoutest heart quails before the onslaught of the mosqui- 

 toes ^ and the staunchest morality grows shaky under the 

 attacks of the terrible black flies, which draw blood at every 

 bite. 



On one occasion we were forced to spend a night trying to 

 work a canoe down a stream which ran through the muskeg, 

 and a more pitiable lot of naturalists could not be imagined 

 than appeared at our camp next morning. Mr. Russell's face 

 was so swollen that his eyes were shut tight, incapacitating 

 him for work. Mr. Smith and myself came near meeting the 

 fate of the last survivors in Byron's "Dream of Darkness:" 

 " Even of their mutual hideousness they died." I dwell upon 

 this for the purpose of giving some idea of the most charac- 

 teristic feature of the region, and the severe hardships which 

 must be endured by the naturalist in the muskeg, which 

 covers thousands of square miles in the North-West Territories 

 of Canada. 



^ S. H. Scudder, in his " Winnipeg Country," gro-\vs eloquent on the subject 

 of these mosquitoes, which he calls "Tiie yellow-jackets of Culex land, illim- 

 itable in numbers, ubiquitous, insatiable, indomitable, hot-tongued, with all the 

 spirit of the Furies." 



