42 WILD LIFE AND THE CAMERA 



the leads but without success. Why, you may ask, 

 am I so anxious to picture the Caribou, that I 

 should devote myself year after year to the effort ? 

 Surely there are many other animals to portray with 

 camera, brush and pen, animals, too, that are easier 

 to find perhaps ? That is, of course, true, but they 

 are for the most part animals far better known, of 

 which more or less truthful pictures have been 

 made, but the Caribou of Newfoundland have 

 scarcely been fairly pictured. Paintings of them 

 are usually grotesque caricatures of the graceful 

 creatures. Look at almost all the pictures that 

 have been made, and what do you see ? A lean, 

 sad, miserable creature with ungainly legs, exagge- 

 rated knee-joints and a hang-dog expression that in 

 no ways resemble the wild Caribou. How it comes 

 that these animals are not more faithfully pictured 

 is probably because the usual zoo specimens from 

 which the studies are made are not in normal con- 

 dition. They almost always suffer from a disease 

 which changes their entire appearance ; the poor 

 creature survives but a short time in captivity, 

 succumbing before it reaches maturity to an illness 

 which apparently is unpreventable. Thus it is that 

 we see so few Caribou in captivity. The change of 

 food, probably more than the change of living, is 

 the cause of this. But whatever it may be, we 

 never see a captive Caribou which resembles the 

 animal in its natural haunts. To my mind there 

 is no more graceful, beautiful animal than the 

 Newfoundland Caribou, beautiful in form and 

 wonderful in colour ; yet the question of indivi- 

 duality among these creatures must be considered. 



