290 ON SNOW-SHOES TO THE BARREN GROUNDS 



kind in letting me have them when all told him they 

 would not live through the Barren Ground experience. I 

 succeeded in getting several white-fish and some dried 

 caribou. I had a hard time to keep the Indians from 

 appropriating it for their own use, and I should very much 

 have liked a bite of it myself ; but my dogs needed it, I 

 thought, more than I, and they ate ravenously. How 

 ravenous they were may be imagined when I say that my 

 steer-dog, Blucher, got wind of a bitch having pups, and 

 devoured them as fast as they were born, until discovered 

 by some of the other dogs, when there ensued a great fight 

 for the remainder of the litter. 



We had come out on Slave Lake about a day and a half 

 south of Fort Rae and three days north of where I had 

 left it in going into the Barrens. Next morning we started 

 for Beniah's house on the lake, and all the Indian men 

 and women started with us, as they were moving their 

 camp a few miles for better fishing. It was a curious 

 spectacle, that moving band of Indians. The men went 

 on ahead with their guns, and the women and children fol- 

 lowed, driving the dogs and packing the household effects, 

 such as they were. The little children that were not old 

 enough to drive dogs carried their younger brothers and 

 sisters that could not walk, and every one of them carried 

 something. 



Of course, we shortly left the Indians, and by noon- 

 time had come to Beniah's house, which we found empty, 

 but we did get a good supply of fish for the dogs there, 

 though none for ourselves. We ate instead some dried 

 meat that Beniah raked up from a corner of his house. 

 Beniah signed me that his wife had moved to where there 

 was fishing owing to the lack of meat at this point ; so 

 we started again, and at 7.30 that night hove in sight of 

 Beniah's lodge. Immediately we fired guns to signal our 



