64 CONSERVATION OF CANADIAN WILD LIFE 



food, with all their experience of the caribou are sometimes 

 unable to find them where they might be expected, with 

 the result that distress and starvation follow. 



Economic Value of Caribou. — In an earlier chapter the 

 value of the caribou as a source of meat was discussed. 

 Perhaps no native wild animal is economically so important 

 and generally useful as the barren-ground caribou. With- 

 out it enormous areas of our northern territory would be- 

 come practically uninhabitable. It supphes the Indians 

 and Eskimos with almost all the necessaries of life: food, 

 clothing, shelter, and means to trade at the trading-post. 

 An excellent description of the utiUzation of the caribou by 

 the Indians is given by Warburton Pike. Describing the 

 Indians' departure to the hunting-ground, he says:* 



He leaves the trading-post, after one of his yearly visits, with a supply 

 of ammunition, tea, and tobacco, a blanket or two, and, if he has made 

 a good season's hunt, is perhaps lucky enough to have taken one of the 

 Company's duffel capotes (about the best form of greatcoat I have ever 

 seen). He has a wife and family waiting for him somewhere on the shore 

 of the big lake where fish are plentiful, expecting a gaudy dress, a shawl, 

 or a string of beads from the fort, but relying entirely on the caribou for 

 maintenance during the awful cold of the coming winter. The journey 

 up till they fall in with the caribou is usually full of hardships, but once 

 they have reached the hunting-ground and found game a great improve- 

 ment in affairs takes place; the hunter is busy killing,! while the women 

 dry meat and make grease, dress the skins for moccasins, mittens, and 

 gun-covers, and cut babiche, which takes the place of string for lacing 

 snow-shoes and many other purposes. For the hair coats, which every- 



* Loc. cit., pp. 49-50. 



t The following extract indicates one of the methods of hunting and kill- 

 ing without rifles: 



Sergeant A. H. Joy, writing on 18 Feb., 1918, states: 



"I had a conversation with a Caribou-eater Indian during the former part 

 of this winter and he told me that the band with whom he lived very seldom 

 used guns to kill the caribou between the end of July and the middle of Sep- 

 tember, as the caribou came through the country so thick that they could 

 crowd them into the lakes and rivers and on the lake shores and kill them 

 with sticks and axes, and on these occasions the animals are slaughtered in 

 hundreds." 



