12 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



scientist-explorer, Roderick Macfarlane, who had been 

 to the arctic coast as early as 1867 when the Indians still 

 lived in perpetual dread of the warlike and more power- 

 ful Eskimos to the north of them who made raids at will 

 as much as four hundred miles into the Indian country, 

 the Indians never thinking to make resistance and vacat- 

 ing large stretches of country whenever the Eskimos ap- 

 proached. Luckily for the Indians, the Eskimos have a 

 prejudice against living in a forest in the winter time, 

 thinking that a tree shade from the sun may be agreeable 

 but having no idea that the shelter of a forest from the 

 wind is anything to be desired. Else they might have 

 despoiled the Indians permanently of their hunting 

 grounds. 



Macfarlane told me that the Eskimo war parties seemed 

 to have only one object and that was to secure suitable 

 stone in a quarry near Fort Good Hope from which to 

 make their knives and the sharp tips of the arrows with 

 which they hunted caribou and the harpoons with which 

 they hunted seals and whales. They came, he said, in 

 singing and shouting boatloads four hundred miles from 

 their own country at the mouth of the Mackenzie River 

 to Good Hope. The time of their arrival was so carefully 

 gauged in advance by the increasing summer heat that 

 the Indians had grown to know the proper fleeing time. 

 Accordingly, they used to abandon their river bank vil- 

 lages in May and retreat into the forest, not returning to 

 the Mackenzie again until autumn when they knew the 

 Eskimos would be f<mc. As the villages consisted of 

 tents iliat could be carried away, the Eskimos found noth- 

 to plunder. It was only -when some accident broughl 

 Indians and Eskimos ier that bloodshed occurred. 



If the parties were anything like the same strength or if 



