WEALTH ON WINGS 



Personally I never saw a duck or goose feather 

 round an Indian camp all the time I was in the 

 north. To be sure it was not yet time for them to 

 begin their fall shooting; and to be sure I was not 

 along the Arctic coast where the Eskimos kill many 

 wildfowl in the spring that is to say, many in 

 proportion to their number, though the total num- 

 ber of Eskimos is not very large, counting all of 

 both bands the Kogwolloks and the Nanatamas. 

 But I got the news of the Arctic coast. 



Old Peter Loutit, at Chippewyan, could not 

 have told us where the white geese or wavies bred, 

 except that it was somewhere in the Arctics. Nei- 

 ther could you or I have told him much more defi- 

 nitely. The white geese do not breed anywhere on 

 the Mackenzie, but somewhere on the islands north 

 of the Mackenzie and perhaps on a limited part of 

 the coast east of the mouth of the Mackenzie. 



Now within the last few years numbers of whal- 

 ing ships have been wintering at Herschel Island, 

 just west of the Mackenzie; and these whaling ships 

 prowl off to the east and northeast after their game, 

 going where the Eskimos cannot go. In this way 

 the whalers have located some of the breeding 

 grounds of the white geese. The whaling settle- 

 ment at Herschel has sometimes contained between 

 two hundred and fifty and five hundred men. It 



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