192 A JOURNEY TO THE 



177 1, son's Bay, yet there is one custom that prevails among them — 

 ^"^* namely, that of the men having all the hair of their heads 

 pulled out by the roots — which pronounces them to be of 

 a different tribe from any hitherto seen either on the coast 

 of Labradore, Hudson's Bay, or Davis's Straits. The women 

 wore their hair at full length, and exactly in the same stile as 

 all the other Esquimaux women do whom I have seen. 



When at the sea-side, (at the mouth of the Copper River,) 

 besides seeing many seals on the ice, I also observed several 

 flocks of sea-fowl flying about the shores ; such as, gulls, 

 black-heads, loons, old wives, ha-ha-wie's, dunter geese, arctic 

 gulls, and willicks. In the adjacent ponds also were some 

 swans and geese in a moulting state, and in the marshes some 

 curlews and plover ; plenty of hawks-eyes, (i.e. the green 

 plover,) and some yellow-legs ;^ also several other small birds, 

 that visit those Northern parts in the [171] Spring to breed 

 and moult, and which doubtless return Southward as the fall 

 advances. My reason for this conjecture is founded on a 

 certain knowledge that all those birds migrate in Hudson's 

 Bay ; and it is but reasonable to think that they are less 

 capable of withstanding the rigour of such a long and cold 

 Winter as they must necessarily experience in a country which 

 is so many degrees within the Arctic Circle, as that is where I 

 now saw them. 



That the musk-oxen, deer, bears, wolves, wolvarines, foxes, 

 Alpine hares,^ white owls, ravens, partridges, ground-squirrels, 

 common squirrels, ermins, mice, &c. are the constant inhabit- 

 ants of those parts, is not to be doubted. In many places, by 

 the sides of the hills, where the snow lay to a great depth, the 

 dung of the musk-oxen and deer was lying in such long and 

 continued heaps, as clearly to point out that those places had 



[1 Gu\\ = LaruSj- b\ackhea.d = S/crna paradis(za Briinn ; loon = Gaviay old- 

 wife^ Hare/da Ayema/is L'mn. ; \\2t.-h3.-v/\t = Harelda hyeinalis'Lmn. ; hawks-eye 

 = Charadrius dominicus Miill. ; yellow-legs = Totanus Jlavipes Gmel. — E. A. P.] 



[2 For descriptions of these mammals see Chapter X.] 



