THE CHASE. 349 
hard during the night, a crust would be formed sufficient to bear 
a man or a dog, but incapable of sustaining the Moose. When 
a Moose was found under such conditions, he was quite at the 
mercy of his pursuers. For a short distance he could force his 
way through the treacherous snow, into which he would sink at 
every step, but in rising from it the sharp edges of the icy crust 
would cut and bruise his legs in a cruel way, and he would soon 
be overtaken and dispatched. 
This cruel mode of pursuing the deer has not been confined to 
the northern regions, where alone the Moose are met with, nor 
yet to the aborigines, who hunted for the necessaries of life, and 
whose greatest resource was the deer, but whenever the condi- 
tions permitted, great numbers of the Virginia deer were thus 
pursued and slaughtered, not only by the aborigines, but by 
our frontier settlers as well. Fortunately, in the lower latitudes, 
where the Virginia deer are most abundant, deep snows covered 
with this strong crust have been of rare occurrence. 
In these conditions the deer are more helpless than any other 
quadruped, by reason of the small, sharp foot, which cuts through 
the crust, while most other animals would be supported upon it. 
The reindeer or caribou, whose foot presents a much broader 
surface for support, has been less persecuted in this way than the 
other members of the family. 
Both the Moose and the caribou, during the winter, when 
deep snows are frequent in the forests which they inhabit, collect 
together in small bands and form what are called yards, gen- 
erally the females and young by themselves. Some of these 
are more complete than others, and it is only the most perfect 
which have been usually described by authors and hunters. In 
these the deer tramp the snow down to a hard floor throughout 
the yard, leaving it surrounded by a vertical wall of the untrodden 
snow. The places selected for these yards are dense thickets, 
affording the greatest abundance of shrubbery, yielding their 
favorite food, which is arboreous. This they utterly destroy 
within their yard, by consuming the twigs and stripping off the 
bark. Even the large trees which they cannot bend down to 
reach the tops, they denude of the bark so far as they can reach. 
If they do not relish this coarse, dry bark of the large trees, 
they consume it all to satisfy their hunger. When all the food 
within the yard, — which sometimes becomes considerably ex- 
tended to reach the shrubbery, — is consumed, they break their 
way to another location where a fresh supply may be found, and 
form a new yard. 
