306 BIG GAME OF NORTH AMERICA. 



' ' The evening before, the noisiest dogs have a muzzle of 

 seal-skin thongs tied around their noses, to prevent their 

 making a clatter that would frighten away the game, should 

 ■ they, in their wanderings, come near enough to the village 

 to hear them. 



' ' When the morning breaks, everything is activity and 

 bustle. The dogs are rapidly harnessed ; those that are to be 

 used for hunting, or bringing the Musk-oxen to bay, are 

 fastened to the sledge by a separate 'slipping-strap,' so 

 that they can be taken out more readily or slipped at once, 

 should the game be unexpectedly encountered, as in a fog 

 or heavy storm. The runners of the sledge are coated with 

 ice, that the vehicle may pull easily over the snows; and 

 when the long'lash of the~whip gives its first crack over the 

 team of dogs, dawn is just emerging into daylight in the 

 east. As direct a line is made as possible to where the 

 trail was seen the day before, and the usual loudly resound- 

 ing commands to the dogs, and the sharp cracking of the 

 whip, are subdued into much lower tones, for obvious 

 reasons. 



"In an Alpine country the sledge must wind consider- 

 ably to keep on a fair grade; for not only the incline is 

 against making a ' bee-line ' for a place, but to cut across 

 the ridges is to expose the icy coating of the sledge-runners 

 to the rocks that peep through the snow where the wind 

 has blown most of it off, and this is fatal to the fragile shoe 

 that is so necessary to make rapid and easy going. 



" Once arrived on the trail, a ' confab ' is hastily indulged 

 in as to whether it is best to follow with the sledges or not. 

 Within about a mile is as close as they desire to have these 

 vehicles approach the game, unless everything is favorable 

 to their hunting — as the wind in their teeth, the sun, if low, 

 behind their backs, etc. When the trail shows that the 

 Musk-oxen are not far ahead — and a white man will marvel 

 at the acuteness displayed by these children of the North 

 in reading the signs on a trail as truly as if it were a book— 

 the sledge or sledges are stopped, the hunting-dogs taken 

 therefrom, and their harness-traces, from fifteen to twenty 



