1 68 THE WILDERNESS HUNTER. 



was a large boggy tract, studded with little 

 pools ; and here again we found plenty of 

 caribou tracks. A caribou has an enormous 

 foot, bigger than a cow's, and admirably 

 adapted for travelling over snow or bogs ; 

 hence they can pass through places where the 

 long slender hoofs of moose or deer, or the 

 round hoofs of elk, would let their own- 

 ers sink at once ; and they are very difficult 

 to kill by following on snow-shoes a method 

 much in vogue among the brutal game 

 butchers for slaughtering the more helpless 

 animals. Spreading out his great hoofs, and 

 bending his legs till he walks almost on the 

 joints, a caribou will travel swiftly over a 

 crust through which a moose breaks at every 

 stride, or through deep snow in which a deer 

 cannot flounder fifty yards. Usually he trots ; 

 but when pressed he will spring awkwardly 

 along, leaving tracks in the snow almost ex- 

 actly like magnified imprints of those of a 

 great rabbit, the long marks of the two hind 

 legs forming an angle with each other, while 

 the forefeet make a large point almost be- 

 tween. 



The caribou had wandered all over the bogs 

 and through the shallow pools, but evidently 

 only at night or in the dusk, when feeding or 

 in coming to drink ; and we again went on. 

 Soon the timber disappeared almost entirely, 

 and thick brushwood took its place ; we were 

 in a high, bare alpine valley, the snow lying 

 in drifts along the sides. In places there 

 had been enormous rock-slides, entirely filling 

 up the bottom, so that for a quarter of a mile 

 at a stretch the stream ran underground. In 



