48 THE GREAT NORTH-WEST 



At a settlement I visited one day I saw a man give a 

 horse a piece of salt, which I at first thought was a piece 

 of loaf-sugar. The animal ate it eagerly, and followed 

 him for more ; and he told me that he could always 

 catch the loose horses in the fields easily by offering 

 them a small lump of salt. This put the idea into my 

 head of trying to attract the wild deer by placing pieces 

 of salt in their tracks. During the winter, when there 

 was snow on the ground, I found this to be of no avail ; 

 but in the autumn it proved a highly attractive bait, and 

 many is the moose and cariboo whose destruction I have 

 compassed by sowing the ground with fragments of salt, 

 while I lay concealed in a convenient spot to shoot them 

 down. On one occasion I shot six deer in one day as 

 the result of this trick. 



Salt is scarce, and often unobtainable, in these wilder- 

 nesses, and the Indians would do or give anything they 

 possessed to obtain it. They often use powder in lieu of 

 it, having learned the habit of using it thus from the 

 trappers. Fortunately I had brought up a large supply 

 of this necessary article, and was frequently applied to 

 by my Indian friends for it, and the children would eat 

 it as children in England do sweetmeats. 



Regarding the habits of the deer of this region, the 

 moose seems to eat the foliage of trees as its principal 

 food ; the wipiti eats all sorts of vegetation ; and the 

 cariboo, also, will eat almost anything it can find, but it 

 certainly prefers mosses to other kinds of green food, and 

 in summer lives almost entirely on this class of vegeta- 

 tion. The moose and the wipiti, particularly, devour the 

 spruce and pine shoots, and, in consequence, their flesh 

 is often strongly impregnated with the flavour of these 

 trees. Cariboo and wipiti are fond of feeding in swamps, 

 but the moose prefers dry ground. All deer take to the 

 water readily, and are good swimmers, but the wipiti 

 seems to me to be most often seen in the water. As a 

 matter of fact, I do not remember to have ever seen a 



