SEARCH FOR CARIBOU TAILS 109 



1913. I would rather trust the diary record than 

 the verbal one, and later experiences have borne 

 this out. 



However, for the moment, I had been encour- 

 aged by the Indians at the post to think that if I 

 continued my canoe journey north I would have 

 every chance of seeing Caribou at the point I now 

 had reached. 



I was in beautiful country. Beyond the 

 bright gravel beach, and points of fine white 

 sand, of lake and river shore, rose hills ; grace- 

 fully rounded and sweeping in outline ; massing 

 large and bold and grand. Along the shores 

 where moisture was plentiful were willows, and 

 a few alders, and small green tamarac trees ; at 

 their roots, mosses, and much of that bushy 

 ground-shrub known as Labrador Tea, the white 

 bloom now dead, and rusty brown where un- 

 blown. Back from the shore were hills grown 

 mostly with scattered, low-statured Northern 

 Scrub Pine; the sand and gravel surfaces moss- 

 covered, and the boulders green as the surround- 

 ings, with lichen. 



From time to time I went ashore to search 

 for signs of Caribou, climbing to bare, sandy, 

 bouldered ridges in some cases, and viewing range 

 after range of like hills, with marsh and lake 

 pockets in the hollows in the foreground. . . . But 

 never a sign of life in the distance — there at my 

 feet game paths worn down by the feet of countless 

 Caribou, antlers long cast aside, hair and bones 

 where an animal had died, markings of hundreds 

 of rabbits (varying hare), but not a single fresh 

 footprint on the sand, except of fox and wolf. 

 9 



