NORTH AMERICA AND THE WEST INDIES 299 



crowding and in others the destruction of winter forage of 

 lichens by fire may have been the prime cause of extended 

 movement . . . Within the past few years more caribou 

 than usual have come into parts of northern Manitoba and 

 Saskatchewan, in winter, and quite recently barren ground 

 caribou have crossed the Slave River into the Wood Buffalo 

 Park and still farther south of the Park in northeastern Alberta 

 where the species was never known before. This southward 

 trend of the barren ground caribou of course brings them out 

 of the comparative protection of the large native hunting 

 reserves and restrictive regulation of white trappers in the 

 Northwest Territories into the northern parts of the Prairie 

 Provinces where white trappers abound. Reduced killing of 

 caribou in parts of the north has perhaps been counterbalanced 

 by increased slaughter in parts of the winter range. Recent 

 expert investigators inform the writer that there has not been 

 much new evidence to change his estimate [of 1930] of about 

 three million caribou in Canada." 



On Southampton Island in northern Hudson Bay there is a 

 local herd of which Sutton and Hamilton, in 1932, saw a few 

 animals. They write that this caribou was "once a very abun- 

 dant animal all over Southampton Island. At the present time 

 it appears to have disappeared almost altogether from the 

 southern part and to be restricted principally to the region of 

 the high country between East Bay and Duke of York Bay, 

 and to the more or less unknown country inland from the 

 coast and north of Cape Kendall." The Eskimos evidently 

 hunt them only occasionally, and there is no evidence that they 

 are greatly depleted. In Baffin Land both Hantzsch and Soper 

 report the barren-ground caribou as local in occurrence and 

 irregular in its appearance about the misson settlements of 

 Cumberland Sound. Almost nothing is known of their num- 

 bers or their migrations, but it seems likely that they keep 

 mainly to their archipelago, which they must have originally 

 reached by way of Boothia. 



