108 On the trail of vanishing birds 



saw the beauty of the tundra at close hand. The crocuses were in 

 bloom and the ground birch was heavy with catkins. Robins, which 

 nest north to the limit of trees, were there, and so were tree 

 sparrows, fox sparrows, yellow warblers, and other harbingers of 

 the Arctic spring. We walked over the thickly bedded reindeer 

 moss, picking the blossoms of the Labrador tea and searching for 

 early tundra flowers. Longspurs flew up in front of us and in the 

 next hour we had found the nests of the white-fronted goose and 

 whistling swan, and seen many other tundra birds: Hudsonian 

 curlews, old-squaw ducks, two kinds of jaegers, and several dif- 

 ferent shore birds. Bob, who is an indefatigable fisherman, tried 

 casting with a shiny chrome spoon as a lure. At first the big trout, 

 who had certainly never seen anything like this, lay there in the 

 cold blue depths and stared suspiciously without making a move 

 to rise to the lure. Then curiosity and habit overcame this initial 

 distrust and one regular granddaddy of a trout grabbed the spoon 

 and after a good fight was landed. The fate of this first trout 

 should have been a warning to the others, but it didn't work out 

 that way and Bob soon had a mess to carry back as a welcome 

 change from reindeer meat. It seemed quite possible that these 

 trout had never seen any kind of man before, and I suggested 

 to Bob that perhaps he had taken advantage of their primeval 

 innocence. At which he simply passed the platter in my direction 

 and I helped myself to another one. 



In July, with undaunted hope, we scouted the muddy delta of 

 the Anderson River not far from the long-abandoned site of old 

 Fort Anderson where, in the early 1860s, Roderick Ross Mac- 

 Farlane had observed migrant whooping cranes each spring and 

 fall. We saw no whoopers, but there were sizable colonies of snow 

 geese and black brant, so we decided to try and find a safe stretch 

 of water for landing to investigate the area on the ground. It is a 

 remote region on an untenanted part of the Arctic coast, 200 

 miles east of Aklavik and nearly 400 miles west of the little settle- 

 ment at Coppermine. There is a great deal of wilderness and 

 nothing but wilderness in between. When the R.C.M.P. learned 

 of our plans they insisted that we borrow from them a heavy- 

 caliber Winchester. They argued that if we were attacked and 



