NELSON] 



TRAPS AND SNARES 



119 



cealed hunter; when they were near enough he would spring up and 

 discharge his arrows; this would distract their attention from the first 

 man, who in the meantime had also concealed himself. In running to 

 escape from the hunter who had just discharged his arrows, the game 

 would frequently circle within shot of the other man and become so 

 confused as to run wildly back and forth, approaching each man in 

 turn several times before the survivors regained their wits sufficiently 

 to make their escape. 



Another method was to close the lower end of a rocky pass through 

 which the deer were accustomed to travel, and then make a drive from 

 the open valley and inclose an entire herd at once, when they were 



11 ^d with lances and arrows. The people said that in cases of this 

 4 they were accustomed to kill every deer thus inclosed, with 

 out -regard to number, and that frequently such large numbers were 

 killed that they were unable to utilize them, and they were left where 

 they fell. 



Deer were also snared with strong nooses of rawhide, which were 

 tied to stout bushes and held open by light strings of grass or sinew con 

 necting them with other bushes, or with small 

 stakes planted in the ground. In feeding, the 

 deer would entangle their antlers or thrust in 

 their heads, so that they were held or strangled 

 by the nooses closing around their necks. 



Another method practiced by the young men 

 in early summer, when the fawns were born, was 

 to look for them, and when a fawn only a few 

 days old was found they would run it down. 

 The hunters considered this sport to be a great 

 test of agility and endurance, for instead of 

 shooting the fawn with arrows, as might readily 

 have been done, it was a matter of pride to pursue the animal until 

 it became so tired and its feet so tender that it stopped and permitted 

 itself to be captured. 



At the time of my visit to Point Barrow in 1881, reindeer were still 

 common in the low mountains to the south and southeast of that place, 

 but it had become very easy to obtain breech loading guns and ammu 

 nition from the whalers, and the people were destroying the deer very 

 rapidly. One old man and his son, it was claimed, had nearly five 

 hundred skins in storage, and others had an abundance of them. 



Dall s sheep were also killed in large numbers by these people and 

 by the Eskimo of Kowak river, judging from the number of skins seen 

 among them. 



Figure 34 shows a model of a deer snare from the lower Yukon; it 

 consists of two straight sticks, to the larger of which the end of the 

 snare is firmly attached, while the outer side of the loop is lightly held 

 by a smaller stick which serves to keep the snare in place. 



FIG. 34 Model of a deer 

 snare. 



