WINTER TRAVEL 



I05 



very comfortably upon that cabin floor and felt little inclined 

 to leave its comparative comfort at 4 a. m. to harness my shiv- 

 ering team in the biting cold of an arctic night and start before 

 daybreak across the Grand Traverse. 



The Indians usually cross at night, directing their course 

 by the stars. They dread the cold winds which blow during 

 the day and fill the air with drifting snow until all landmarks 

 are obscured. 



Until we reached the mainland north of the lake, we had to 

 dig driftwood for fuel out of the deep snow. We followed the 

 canoe route, with which I had become painfully familiar the 

 preceding summer, As we were plodding along one evening 

 among the islands, my dogs suddenly caught the scent of a 

 band of caribou which was somewhere to windward on the 

 mainland. They had been hauling as if quite exhausted, but 

 that scarcely perceptible breath of air was sufficient to start 

 them at full speed toward the familiar game. 



We reached Rae late on the sixth day, though we had to rise 

 at 3 a. m. each morning to make the trip in the appointed time. 

 I suffered from the mal de racqiiette the last day which, fortu- 

 nately, had not before troubled me on the whole six hundred 

 and fifty-mile journey; I had been absent two months from 

 Rae, had pushed the sled most of that distance, and had not 

 even seen a buffalo track for my pains. 



The prospects for a successful musk-ox hunt, which was the 

 next and the chief undertaking of the expedition, were not 

 promising, so that my spirits were at the lowest ebb during 

 the month of February, 1894, which I spent in the cold and 

 lonely cabin at Rae. 



During the month Mr. Hodgson and I maintained a "trap- 

 ping track," or rather, a line of poisoned baits, thirty miles in 

 length. The Dog Ribs were so afraid of strychnine that they 

 would not even touch an animal killed by it. They know that 

 it is very bad medicine indeed, for did not Kwatse die in the 

 springtime from using the water of the Great Slave Lake a few 

 miles from where a bait had been left in the winter's snow? 

 The Loucheux of the Lower Mackenzie are not so timid, they 

 use strychnine for baits without fear. Nearly every clerk sets 

 a few baits each winter, which usually succeed in killing the 

 favorite dog of the post, a red or cross fox, or very rarely a 

 silver fox. 



