GILPIN — ON THE MAMMALIA OF NOVA SCOTIA. 59 



These dimensions are enormous, but are fully carried out by 

 Captain Hardy and other authors, though doubted by Sir John 

 Richardson, who, accustomed to the Arctic variety, weighing when 

 dressed sixty pounds, and which the hunter tossed over his shoul- 

 der, thought a cariboo weighing four hundred pounds must be a 

 mistake for another species of deer. I have now given his appear- 

 ance, colour winter and summer, structure of hoof, his weight and 

 dimensions, and in this have rather shunned authors, but taken my 

 own and the observations of eye witnesses. The only one I have 

 seen living was a young doe without horns ; she was of the soiled 

 white or winter colour, and resembled Bewick's wood cut of the 

 Lapland reindeer, and also Landseer's exquisite etching of a cariboo's 

 head, after Captain Back, {Fauna Borealis.) The plates from 

 *' Mammals of Zoological Gardens," and of Sir Wm. Jardine, 

 copied by all writers, though no doubt good representatives of rein- 

 deer, were less like her. 



It now remains to give a sketch of his habits in our own Pro- 

 vince. Formerly very abundant, and in our own time plenty, as 

 the skins brought to market some fifty years ago showed ; but few 

 skins and scarcely a carcase of meat in one or two years finds its 

 way now to town. Therefore if they are becoming extinct, it is 

 not by the hand of man. When I lived in the western counties, a 

 year or two would elapse before one was killed ; we have no wild 

 animals which destroy them ; wolves, happily extinct, are the only 

 ones to be dreaded. If then they are becoming extinct, it must be 

 by that noiseless way that wild animals fade out ^^of sight, as their 

 feeding grounds become encroached upon ; they lose their reproduc- 

 tiveness, the doe has fewer fawns, the buck becomes early barren, 

 the devoted race dies out. Now, the food of this ancient deer ex- 

 ists as it did in Pleistocene times, perhaps on the very spot, but 

 in less abundance. Forests have sprung up, and grasses have given 

 verdant carpets to a warmer soil ; the lichens and mosses his food, 

 {Cladonia rangeferina) {Sticla pulmonaria) ( CT^^iea) are now 

 found in isolated barrens, or cariboo bogs as they are termed, 

 and they are every year encroached upon. The great cariboo bog 

 at Aylesford, the water shed of the Province, has a rail road run- 

 ning for five miles on its surface. The table land of the north 



