INTO THE TERRA-NOVA COUNTRY 15 



serenaded us with his melancholy hoots. Twice I flushed 

 these big birds in the daytime, and they flopped slowly away 

 as if disturbed out of a siesta. Sometimes as I crept through 

 the wood at dawn something would impel me to look up, and 

 meet a pair of great golden eyes that surveyed the intruder 

 with intense disapproval. The hawk-owl, too, was some- 

 times seen perched on a withered tree, from which point of 

 vantage he searched the ground for voles. As yet we had 

 not met that delightfully cheeky fellow, the Canadian wood 

 jay, moose-bird, or whisky jack, as he is variously named ; 

 but of him more anon. 



Mollygojack Lake is a fine large sheet of water, roughly 

 speaking about twenty miles round, and the surrounding 

 forests are a great summer house of the woodland caribou. It 

 has one or two pretty little islands, where the great northern 

 divers evidently breed (I saw two females with young ones close 

 to them), and it took us till evening to reach the western end 

 where we camped for the night. Here was plenty of fresh 

 sign of caribou, but not too fresh, so we decided not to hunt 

 but to move on next day to St. John's Lake, on which our 

 hopes were centred, at the camp where Selous had killed 

 his deer. 



We made an early start the next day, August 28, up the 

 eight or ten miles of lake-river which separates Mollygojack 

 from St. John's Lake, and which was only difficult for short 

 distances. Our midday dinner was taken on the river about 

 half-way, when shortly after re-starting I saw something move 

 behind a large rock on the left bank about 300 yards 

 up stream. In another moment the head of a doe caribou 

 appeared and again disappeared, so we rushed the canoe 

 under the shelter of a projecting headland, and I landed. After 

 leaving Saunders and signalling to Jack to keep out of sight, 



