152 THE GREAT NORTH-WEST 



mention that an ancestor of mine, Captain Gotham, who 

 had had great experience of" whale-fishing, both in the 

 Arctic regions and in southern waters, has left it on 

 record that he has killed Greenland whales of upwards 

 of sixty feet long and sperm whales of more than eighty 

 feet. Such giants are never met with now, but from 

 what is known of the captain's character I am sure he 

 would not exaggerate. Whalers always attacked the 

 finest fish (as they insist on miscalling them), and hence, 

 no doubt, the reason that so few large animals survive. 

 The whale certainly takes many years to attain its full 

 size, and I greatly doubt if any whale now lives to reach 

 full maturity. If the assertion that I find in a certain 

 work has any foundation in fact — viz. that whales live to 

 many hundreds of years, possibly to a thousand — it is not 

 surprising that few or none now attain to the full size. 

 The steam-whalers see to that, for they can easily single 

 out and capture the biggest animals. 



On this river, and also on the coast near its mouth, 

 there were many bats, one of which was the silvery bat, 

 Vesperugo noctivagans. Both on the sea and the river 

 these bats hawked very near the surface of the water, 

 on the latter sometimes actually striking the water. They 

 also flew high in the air, and inland among the trees, and 

 so rapid and irregularly that I had great difficulty in ob- 

 taining a specimen, not being used to bat-shooting. Of 

 the other species of bats in this district I can give no 

 description. Almost everywhere, from Winnipeg to this 

 place, bats were seen, generally in scanty numbers, but I 

 never had the opportunity of securing specimens until 

 now. I think, however, judging from style and appear- 

 ance on the wing, that this species is one of the commonest 

 bats in the Canadian region. 



Nearly all the birds of the duck kind hitherto 

 mentioned were found here, either on the river or the 

 sea-coast, where countless numbers seemed to be just 

 finishing the duties of reproduction, and the young birds 



