136 HUNTING CAMPS. 



direction ; then, as caribou sometimes will, he circled 

 round at a trot in order to get our wind. This brought 

 him at one point to within about two hundred yards, 

 on which I threw the foresight upon his chest as he 

 turned, and fired. He gave a couple of bounds and 

 went off in a cloud of marsh water. Although I had 

 heard the first bullet strike, I was about to fire a second 

 shot, when he fell head over heels into a bog-hole, where 

 little but his antlers and one hind hoof were showing 

 above the mud by the time we ran up. It was neces- 

 sary to make a little bridge of logs to the body before 

 we were able to touch the trophy, which turned out to 

 be rather past its prime. Nevertheless the weight of 

 the head made up for its irregularities, and we were 

 glad to think that we had at last killed a stag upon 

 those ridges of which both of us had been thinking for 

 so many months. 



After the day just described the wet weather, alas I 

 resumed its sway, the winds blew more violently than 

 ever, and, worst of all, rain once more took the place of 

 snow, and for the following days and nights we were 

 never dry. The deer upon the Middle Ridge country 

 proved to be exceedingly wild, a fact which we at the 

 time accounted for by concluding that they might 

 possibly have been harried by wolves. This opinion 

 was, however, later proved to be erroneous. The true 

 reason is that Middle Ridge, as well as the burnt lands 

 to the west of it, form one of the chief hunting-grounds of 

 the Mic-mac Indians ; indeed, the ridge itself is parcelled 

 out into individual preserves and rigorously hunted. The 

 chief of the Mic-macs told me that a number of his 

 people were camped in the Partridgeberry Hills near the 

 source of the Gander in the previous September. 



