22 MUSEUM BULLETIN NO. 6. 



them, and carefully avoid their haunts. Besides, the white men 

 usually had boats and always sought to follow routes where wood 

 could be had for fuel; this confined them to the wooded valleys 

 of the Coppermine, Kendall, and Dease, all of which (in so far as 

 they are wooded) the Eskimo pretty rigidly avoid, through fear 

 of the Indians. A journey made the summer of 1910 along the 

 routes of Dease and Simpson, Richardson, Rae, or Hanbury 

 would have revealed not a single Eskimo, nor would a coasting 

 voyage of Great Bear lake have done so either. The Eskimo 

 frequent the barren highlands, camp usually among mottled 

 boulders where their mottled little tents are seldom discernible 

 with the naked eye at over half a mile; they do not often make 

 fire and never make large ones, and they keep a remarkably keen 

 watch day and night, always ready to flee on hearing the report 

 of a gun or seeing a man, a smoke, or a fresh trail or other sign 

 of human presence. Even after we had been with them four 

 months it was hard to keep them from fleeing precipitately on 

 sighting a tipi camp, which proved to be that of the English 

 travellers Melvill and Hornby (September, 1910), near the east- 

 ern treeline of the Dease river. 



The Eskimo themselves say they "always" hunted to the 

 shore of Great Bear lake (eastern part of the north shore of Mc- 

 Tavish bay). The oldest of the active hunters (perhaps 45 or 

 50 years old) told us that, when they first remember, people in 

 greater number than now used to hunt to the lake shore. Some 

 had never seen signs of the immediate presence of Indians; one 

 man had twice been in a party which had had occasion to flee 

 from the very beach of the lake once on hearing the report of 

 a gun; another time on seeing smoke. (It may have been 

 through hearsay from Hudson bay that they were able to identify 

 the report of a gun as a sign of the nearness of Indians, for this 

 happened when a man now forty years old, at least, was a small 

 boy, and most of them had never seen a gun fired until we hunted 

 with them. It is possible, of course, that the memory of fire- 

 arms was preserved by the Pallirmiut ( ?) whom Richardson and 

 Rae met some fifty years ago). 



As the object is woodgathering rather than trade, the people 

 who frequent the district never have occasion to come together 



