398 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



fined, it refuses food, and then perishes of self-imposed starvation. 

 The most patient and extended trials have been made at Nooshagak 

 by imported Karnschadales, who were raised to the life of deer- 

 driving over there ; yet, in no instance whatsoever were these 

 experts able to overcome the difficulty and accustom those timid 

 animals to the sight, sound, and smell of man. The Alaskan spe- 

 cies is much larger than its Asiatic cousin, but otherwise resembles 

 it closely, being, if anything, more uniformly gray in tint and less 

 spotted with white over the back and head. 



Reindeer have a most extended range in Alaska, where an im- 

 mense area of tundra and upland moors yield an abundance of 

 those mosses and lichens which they most affect. Innumerable 

 sloughs and lakes afford these deer a harbor of refuge from cruel tor- 

 ments of mosquitoes, when the wind does not blow briskly in sum- 

 mer ; the wooded interior gives them shelter from the driving fury 

 of wintry snow-storms. Big brown bears follow in the wake of 

 travelling herds, and feed fat upon all sickly or weaker members 

 and imprudent fawns of the drove ; so do wolves and wolverines ; 

 and the lop-eared lynx is not missing. 



Nooshagak is a trading centre for that entire Bristol Bay dis- 

 trict, which comprises the coast of Bering Sea from Cape Ne wen- 

 ham, in the north, to the peninsular extremity at Oonimak, in the 

 south an immense expanse in which some four thousand Innuits 

 abide, and live largely upon fish and deer-meat. The Oogashik, 

 Igageek, Nakneek, Kvichak, Nooshagak, Igoosheek, and Togiak 

 Eivers all empty into this great shallow gulf. Up their swollen 

 channels, after an opening of the ice during the last half of May, 

 salmon run from the sea in irregular but constant travel until the 

 end of August. Inferior salmon run even as late as November, 

 while the various kinds of salmon-trout and white-fish exist under 

 the ice of deep streams and lakes all winter. By the middle of 

 September hard frosts in the mountains congeal all sources of in- 

 numerable rivulets which have helped to swell the volume and 

 raise the level of a river's summer flood, and then these streams 

 which we have just named begin to fall rapidly in their channels. 

 If we chance to travel anywhere along their banks at this time, we 

 will find them covered with windrows and heaps of dead salmon 

 two and three feet in height. The gravelly beaches of the lakes, 

 the bars and shoals of every stream, are then lined with decaying 

 and putrid bodies of these fish, while every overhanging bough 



