WEALTH ON WINGS 



The greater portion of the shores of the thousand 

 miles of these great waterways is, on the contrary, 

 entirely unsuited as breeding grounds for wildfowl. 

 These birds must have low and marshy country, and 

 not rocky shores or vast flats covered with intermin- 

 able growths of spruce and cottonwood and willows. 



The truth is or the truth as I conceive it to be 

 after a journey to the mouth of the Mackenzie, 

 thence west to the Yukon, and south to the Pacific 

 Ocean that only a relatively very small portion of 

 that great wilderness country is suitable for raising 

 wildfowl. I do not believe the percentage of such 

 acreage is anywhere near so large perhaps it is 

 not one-fifth or one-tenth as large as the percent- 

 age of acreage naturally found in the Dakotas, Sas- 

 katchewan, and Alberta. 



Certainly, though the season was at that time bet- 

 ter advanced so that the young birds began to show, 

 I saw more ducks in the ponds along the Canadian 

 Pacific Railroad in three days in August than I had 

 seen in three months in all that Far-Northern coun- 

 try. I do not offer this as a conclusive argument 

 at all, but as a phenomenon easily explained; yet 

 nothing on my entire northern trip was more disap- 

 pointing than this conclusion, that we all had been 

 overestimating the extent and productiveness of 

 these vaguely located northern breeding grounds. 



187 



