THE REINDEER HUNT 



ptarmigan) on the road, and a partridge, eaten raw 

 and warm, is a real delicacy to Eskimo ways of 

 thinking. 



There is bigger game for those who seek it; I 

 have heard the scufflings of a wolf among the dogs 

 when we camped in a snow hut on the mountain 

 pass, and I have known the drivers stop the sledge 

 among the stunted trees on some desolate neck of 

 land between the fiords, and have watched them 

 peering at the spoor of a bear in the snow. " Tumin- 

 git" (his footprints), they say. " Old, no good." 



It is remarkable how long one may live in 

 Labrador without seeing any of these fur animals in 

 the wild state ; as for myself, the nearest I ever got 

 to a bear was when Paulus came to me and said " Me 

 kill a bear you want some, eh?" and so for next 

 day's dinner we had a roast haunch of black bear on 

 the table, and found it excellent. There are black 

 bears in plenty for those who have the time or the 

 opportunity to go after them ; as late as 1907, a 

 party of officers from a visiting ship went up Nain Bay 

 in a launch, and shot three fine bears in one afternoon. 



The Eskimos themselves are always on the tracks 

 of one sort of animal or another ; hunting is their 

 very life, and as the days of winter went by, and the 

 excitement of sealing at the sina and trapping in the 

 woods began to wane, I was not surprised that there 

 was something else to occupy their thoughts. 

 " Tuktu " began to be the burden of their talk from 

 morning till night. 



The men stood chattering in groups ; the women 

 indoors were sewing and mending from dawn to 

 sunset and sometimes far into the night ; " Tuktu, 

 tuktu, tuktu," was in everybody's mouth the rein- 



