HOW I LEARNED TO HUNT CARIBOU 251 



misfortune, or else because they either did not try to hunt 

 or else did not know well the technique of finding and 

 securing game. 



A common mistake about caribou is to suppose that 

 they are more difficult to hunt in districts where they are 

 frequently hunted by people than in countries where they 

 are never hunted at all. I find there is no such difference. 

 The reason is simple. They have one great enemy, the 

 wolf. On the prairies in the northern half of Canada and 

 on the islands to the north of Canada there are many mil- 

 lions of caribou. Some say there are ten million all 

 together and some say there are thirty million. In these 

 great herds there must be born every year anything from 

 two million to six million calves. The number of caribou 

 killed by human beings in all of northern Canada is far 

 less than one million per year. Accordingly, the caribou 

 would increase very rapidly were it not for the wolves 

 which kill several times as many as do the human hunters 

 — Indian, Eskimo and white. Wolves are found wherever 

 caribou are found and the caribou are in continual dread 

 of them. They are, therefore, almost equally harried in 

 countries that are uninhabited by men as in countries 

 that are inhabited. I have, accordingly, found that 

 even in the remote new islands which we discovered in 

 19 1 5 caribou are about as difficult to approach as in 

 northern Alaska or on the Canadian mainland where they 

 are continually hunted by Eskimos. 



Apart from the islands actually discovered by my 

 expedition, there is no known country in the northern 

 hemisphere that has been so little visited as Isachsen 

 Land in north latitude 79 °, west longitude 103 °. We 

 feel sure that no Eskimos ever saw that island. From 

 the beginning of the world to our time it had been visited 



