66 HUNTING CAMPS. 



save foxes. Once Sam, looking over the vast landscape 

 of fir and spruce interspersed with wide and dismal marshes, 

 remarked, " The Labrador do make a man feel terrible lone- 

 some." I do not think any words could have bettered 

 this description. 



It brought to mind also the fact that here in the far 

 north, where the limitless barrens set no bounds to his 

 wanderings, the caribou is a most elusive animal, capricious 

 and uncertain in the line of his migrations. Yet the Indians, 

 Montagnais and Nascaupees of Labrador, as well as the 

 Eskimo tribes of the north, have nothing but the herds 

 between them and the grim shape of " Bukadawin " (Fam- 

 ine) who sat in Hiawatha's wigwam. Bands of the Indians 

 and Eskimo pass away into the barrens every year to search 

 for the caribou ; if they cut the line of migration they fare 

 sumptuously and, moreover, make provision for the winter 

 for their families. But should they fail to meet them, 

 there is often an end to their hunting, and the squaws down 

 in the timber lands watch in vain for their return. How 

 many times, one wonders, has a company of Indians strug- 

 gled forward, staring at the horizon, where white snow 

 meets grey sky, straining their eyes for the shapes which 

 are perhaps passing in thousands just beyond a man's 

 sight to the east or the west of them. The story is told of 

 such a party of hunters who waited and watched in vain. 

 One died and then another ; whatever weakness any indi- 

 vidual had, it found him out, until at last but two were 

 left, and they also had turned their faces to the skin wall 

 of the fireless tent, when the stronger, crawling to the door, 

 saw a forest of horns growing up against the wide sunrise 

 as unnumbered deer moved slowly out of the north-east. 



Having exhausted the hunting-grounds about the inlet, 

 we derived some fresh encouragement from a statement of 

 Sam's to the effect that one September some seventeen years 

 earlier a band of Eskimo had visited a lake lying to the 



