THE NEWFOUDLAND CARIBOU 333 



A caribou will as soon swim as walk. I once saw two 

 does enter the extreme end of a long narrow lake about one 

 mile long and two hundred yards broad, and swim the whole 

 length, when they could easily have walked along the side. 



The Newfoundland caribou are plagued throughout the 

 greater part of the year by flies and their maggots. Two 

 kinds of gad-fly infest them, and a large species squirts its 

 maggots, furnished with small hooks, into the channels of the 

 nostrils, where they feed on the mucus, and grow to a large 

 size by July, when they are ejected by the deer and finish 

 their final stage in the ground. The other, a small one, whose 

 maggot is laid in the skin of the back and flanks, must give 

 the deer endless torture. These commence to grow in October, 

 and are not got rid of until the end of July, when the skin 

 is riddled as if by swan-shot. The irritation caused by these 

 pests must be intense, for the deer are often to be seen rubbing 

 their flanks on the rocks and stones in spring-time. In the 

 summer, too, hosts of mosquitoes, sand flies, and black flies 

 attack them, and drive them to the highest points of land away 

 from the rivers. 



It is very difticult to figure out the number of caribou in 

 Newfoundland, and all estimates must be mere guesses. Mr. 

 Moulton of Burgeo, judging by the numbers wintering in the 

 barrens north of that place and White Bear Bay, puts it at 

 250,000, and thinks they are increasing at the rate of 10,000 

 annually. Mr. Howley, on the other hand, places the figures 

 at 100,000, and I think that double this number is a very fair 

 estimate. In spite of the enormous slaughter which takes place 

 annually, and which is every year greatly on the increase,^ 



' I have the best authority for stating that over a thousand guns were sold by one 

 firm in St. John's in 1905. "Personally conducted" parties, numbering fifty men 

 in each party, are now coming from America every year, and who knows to what 

 this number may reach. 



