CARIBOU ISLAND AND VICINITY. 199 



its huge mass of ice into the sea. Surely these well- defined and 

 pecuHar shaped plateaus are of glacial origin, and being in all 

 cases, so far as I have seen them, of pretty much the same form 

 and shape, the suggestion is of a common glacial one. Before we 

 leave the subject a few words about Salmon Bay may be of interest. 

 Salmon Bay, like the majority of the long, fiord-like bays so numerous 

 on the coast east of it, is a long, rather narrow inlet, about four 

 miles in length, extending into the land in a northwesterly di- 

 rection. At its mouth Caribou Island, a little island a mile wide 

 and a mile and a half in extent, occupies the greater part of the 

 western side of the entrance ; beyond a small pond-like piece of 

 water, about three-quarters of a mile in either direction, is nearly 

 enclosed by the small points of land that reach towards each other 

 from the opposite side of the basin which admits one to the bay 

 proper. In summer this is the seat of one of the largest fishing 

 posts on this portion of the coast. Some eight or ten establish- 

 ments here employ about one hundred and fifty men, and seven 

 cod seines valued at twenty-five hundred dollars are used in the 

 fisheries. 



I must not forget that the country to the east of Salmon Bay, 

 and before reaching the high cliffs and bluffs just next the river, is 

 rather low, and made up of rounded crests of hills covered here and 

 there with a scanty vegetation, presenting something of the appear- 

 ance of a hilly New England farm lot. The tops of the hills were 

 strewed with a few loose stones either broken from the rocks them- 

 selves or left there by some agency of ice or water. The same 

 general features existed in most parts of the bay on both sides, 

 and as I looked upon the scene I could almost imagine the mighty 

 force that, slowly pushing itself and creeping onward by its own 

 plastic mobility down the channels from some interior region, 

 gradually ground off these hill tops, and scattered these stones, while 

 it levelled the feeble barriers that attempted to confine it to the 

 land, and buried itself in the sea. 



From Salmon Bay, across a narrow plateau-like ridge, we de- 

 scended to the sea again — frozen in a mass of icy needles that flashed 



