LET US GO AFIELD 



miles north of Edmonton, and numbers of robins 

 round Fort McPherson, under the midnight sun. 

 I saw one jacksnipe on the summit of the Rocky 

 Mountains, at a pass which is only about a hundred 

 miles south of the Arctic Ocean. I saw one speci- 

 men of the sharp-tailed grouse, killed in the willows 

 close to Fort McPherson, its markings almost the 

 same as those of the sharp-tail of Saskatchewan or 

 the Dakotas. 



When I state that we traveled forty-rive hundred 

 miles on three great waterways of the upper north 

 and never saw a bear, moose, deer, or caribou, or 

 anything else larger than a fox, and that we saw 

 relatively few broods of ducks, I think that though 

 we should not reason from one particular experience 

 to a general or sweeping conclusion, it will be ad- 

 mitted that the north is a land of want and not a 

 land of plenty as to wildfowl or any other great 

 natural supply of food. The truth is, in that coun- 

 try the white man or the red man thinks more of 

 grub than he does of anything else, and always 

 from the point of want. It is always a starving 

 country. 



Now, since both white and red men live there, 

 close to such breeding grounds as there are, and 

 since, moreover, they both say the wildfowl are 

 decreasing and not increasing, what is to be our 



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