208 With Rod a?id Gun in A^ezu England 



CHAPTER VIII. 



Cahibou Hating in ^4ew Brunswick. 



By FRANK H. RISTEEN. 



By many sportsmen of experience the woodland caribou is given a 

 higher place in the category of game animals than the moose. His solemn, 

 almost patriarchal aspect, — his silent, furtive, whimsical ways, — his mys- 

 terious migrations from one section of the country to another, which seem 

 to be the product of sheer restlessness rather than of reason or necessity, — 

 his wonderful speed and endurance in traversing the deepest snows of 

 winter and his capacity to thrive upon such evanescent and ethereal fare 

 as the reindeer-lichen, are among the factors which make the caribou an 

 object of interest to all who have formed his acquaintance on his native 

 heath. Like the moose he is a true child of the wilderness and intolerant 

 of the presence of man. 



It is reasonably certain that no section of North America within con- 

 venient reach of the big-game sportsman, with the possible exception of 

 Newfoundland (where the caribou attains his greatest perfection but where 

 the laws are very stringent as to visitors), now offers facilities equal to those 

 of New Brunswick for caribou hunting. The vast primeval wilderness of 

 this Province, untainted still for the most part by the touch of man, is 

 interspersed with innumerable barrens, or " bogs," as they are commonly 

 called in Maine, as well as a marvellous natural network of lakes and 

 streams, whose unfrequented shores constitute a genuine caribou paradise. 



The uniform testimony of competent observers is that the caribou 

 population is rapidly increasing in New Brunswick and it is the theory of 

 some that the persistent hunting, in season and out of season, which these 

 animals have experienced of recent years in Maine has resulted in a con- 

 siderable exodus to New Brunswick, where up to the present time they have 

 scarcely been molested. On the headwaters of the Tobique, the south- 

 west and northwest Miramichi, as well as of the Nepisiquit, it is not uncom- 

 mon for herds to be seen numbering from fifty to one hundred individuals. 

 Wolves and panthers are now unknown in this Province, the lynx is becom- 

 ing rare, and the only natural enemy the caribou has to fear is the black 

 bear, whose efforts in stalking and pulling down unwary stragglers from the 



