Woodland Caribou 



band just above the hoofs white, muzzle and face dark except the 

 front of the upper lips. Grayer in winter with head and neck 

 nearly white. Antlers with one (rarely both) of the brow tines 

 flattened and palmate standing out vertically in front of the face, 

 above this is another branched tine more or less palmate and the 

 summit of the antler is again palmately expanded. The exact 

 pattern and extent of the palmation is exceedingly variable. 

 Range. Wooded parts of British America, northern Maine and 

 Montana. 



The caribou's hair in summer is brown to match the dun 

 coloured barrens and marshes. In the fall it grows longer and 

 thicker, the new growth being very much lighter so that in mid- 

 winter and early spring the general effect is smoky white the 

 colour of a snowstorm in the woods, and the moss-hung, snow- 

 flecked spruce trees among which the caribou feed and seek pro- 

 tection during the cold weather. Their rough antlers looking like 

 dead, weather-beaten branches also help them in their everlasting 

 game of hide and seek. 



It is evident to the most unscientific that the woodland caribou is 

 only a branch of the great reindeer family, which has either wandered 

 south into the woods of Canada and the northern United States, or 

 else lingered behind when the wide extended ice sheet of the glacial 

 period withdrew again to the Arctic regions thousands of years ago, at 

 the time the little alpine plants, still found on Mt. Washington, got 

 left behind by their kindred. In whichever case they certainly appear 

 to have found the conditions favourable and have increased in size 

 accordingly. 



But the woodland caribou still feels at times the old inherited 

 desire for wide open stretches of treeless country, particularly in 

 summer, when they wander out over the extensive barrens and flat 

 bog lands to pasture on the coarse sedge-grass growing there. 



Although perfectly at home in the thickets where they winter, 

 browsing on moss and lichens; their power for leaping over windfalls 

 and bush is as yet an acquired art, not instinctive and hereditary as it 

 is with the true deer of the wildwood. W. M. J. Long in his " Wilder- 

 ness Ways" says: "Caribou are naturally poor jumpers. Beside a 

 deer who often goes out of his way to jump a fallen tree just for the 

 fun of it, they have no show whatever; though they can travel much 

 further in a day and much easier. Their gait is a swinging 

 trot from which it is impossible to jump; and if you frighten 



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