434 The National Geographic Magazine 



from the statements of Mr Selous and 

 other well-known sportsmen who have 

 hunted on this island, viz., the supposedly 

 great speed of the caribou in swimming. 

 When undisturbed, a single caribou, 

 crossing large lakes, swims about three 

 miles an hour, and a fair-sized herd 

 swims somewhat slower. When first 

 sighting the canoe, the animal springs 

 half out of the water, and then, with 

 head erect, tries to elude the paddlers, 

 and for the first one hundred yards its 

 speed varies between five and six miles 

 an hour; and then, becoming somewhat 

 exhausted by the extreme exertion, the 

 speed slows down to about three and one- 

 half miles an hour — a gait that one pad- 

 dler in a loaded canoe has no trouble in 

 beating. The swimming speed of this 

 animal is therefore below that of the 

 moose and the white-tail deer. 



I saw no caribou enter the water be- 

 fore 7 a. m. or later than 5 p. m., the 

 movement being greatest from 10 to 3. 

 The animals, as a rule, are not nocturnal, 

 either when migrating or feeding, though 

 in the fly season they feed at night, and 

 late in the fall, under the stress of heavy 

 snow-storms, sometimes travel night and 

 day. 



It is also noticeable that they gener- 

 ally move against the wind, depending 

 almost - wholly upon the nose to detect 

 danger, which from time immemorial al- 

 ways lay before them, in their long march 

 from the northern peninsula to the south- 

 erly coast. As the result of relying so 

 much upon scent, neither their hearing 

 nor sense of sight is at all acute, for one 

 may sit close to the runwav and the ani- 

 mal, if the wind is favorable, will pass 

 by within a rod. 



Since the building of the railroad that 

 intersects the island, many large herds 

 of caribou remain permanently either 

 north or south of the track, and in this 

 respect resemble the white-tail deer of 

 northern Michigan before mentioned. 



While the island is visited each fall bv 

 numerous non-resident sportsmen in 

 quest of stags with fine heads, it is diffi- 

 cult to compute the amount of meat 

 abandoned each year in the more remote 



portions or because the rankness of the 

 stag often makes its meat unfit for food 

 at that season of the year. Two years 

 ago, for instance, I met three young col- 

 legians from the "States," who several 

 days before, on barrens east of Grand 

 Lake, encountered a number of migrating 

 caribou, and by good judgment and ac- 

 curate shooting had, in a single day, 

 picked out and killed nine large caribou 

 stags- — the three apiece allowed by law. 

 They candidly admitted that, owing to 

 the toughness of the stags and the dis- 

 tance from their camp, every ounce, 

 aside from the heads, had been aban- 

 doned, representing a total of more than 

 3,500 pounds. 



Yet these young men had come thou- 

 sands of miles for caribou hunting and 

 were in every (other) respect a manly 

 set of fellows. After seeing some of my 

 caribou pictures and hearing the inci- 

 dents connected therewith, they seemed 

 to realize that big-game hunting with the 

 camera was an ideal method and one 

 that they hoped to try hereafter. As 

 with the caribou stags, so with the bull 

 moose, the bull elk, and the gigantic 

 grizzly bear, whose decaying flesh we 

 have noticed year after year polluting 

 the air of some beautiful valley, simply 

 because the antlers or the hide was all 

 that could be saved when these great ani- 

 mals were stricken down in districts too 

 remote for transportation. 



THE BROWN PELICANS OF THE INDIAN 

 RIVER 



For many years I had been familiar 

 with the pelican colony on Indian River, 

 Florida. On one occasion, four or five 

 years ago, I made a trip expressly to 

 "take flashlight pictures of the breeding 

 birds, but upon firing the first flash the 

 whole colony took wing, heading for the 

 boat with its glaring lantern, until we 

 were fairly overwhelmed, as hundreds 

 of great birds, with flapping wings and 

 large bodies, banged into or over the 

 boat. Crouching down in the bottom, 

 with the cameras hurled from the bow, 

 we waited until the avalanche was over, 

 when my Virginia guide, a stranger to 



