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Following the Caribou 
by John P. Kelsall 
Caribou and the Barren-lands, by 
George Calef. Canadian Arctic Re- 
sources Committee , 46 Elgin Street, Ot- 
tawa, Ontario KIP 5K6, $34.95; 176 
pages, illus. 
An old Chipewyan Indian proverb 
says that “no one knows the ways of the 
wind and the caribou.” While this is still 
partly true, George Calef in his beauti- 
ful new book Caribou and the Barren- 
lands shows how far knowledge of this 
once mysterious animal has advanced. 
The caribou of northern North Amer- 
ica have interested succeeding genera- 
tions of explorers, traders, missionaries, 
settlers, and scientists since the six- 
teenth century. It is fair to say that a 
good deal of human endeavor, and sim- 
ple subsistence, could not have been 
maintained had it not been for the ubiq- 
uitous caribou and for the meat and 
hides that they provided. Settlements 
and seasonal camps were strategically 
placed so that once or twice a year an 
abundance of caribou would migrate by 
and provide the hunters with the neces- 
sities of life. When the caribou did not 
come, and that sometimes occurred, 
hardship or starvation resulted. 
The migration and numbers of the 
caribou were a mystery to man until the 
twentieth century. The realization that 
the same caribou that were hunted on 
the arctic coast in summer by Inuit 
(Eskimos) were also hunted in the forest 
in winter by Indians was slow to become 
generally accepted. Despite great reduc- 
tions in the numbers of the animals on 
the peripheries of their ranges, some 
instances being recorded near the turn 
of the eighteenth century by Samuel 
Heame and Sir John Franklin, most 
people believed that there were vast 
untapped herds in the uninhabited cen- 
ters of their ranges. As late as 1930, 
George Critchell-Bullock wrote that the 
caribou as a whole were safe because 
“all but the flankers of the annual move- 
ments [are] immune from systematic 
slaughter.” In the early twentieth cen- 
tury Ernest Thompson Seton estimated 
that the Canadian Barren Lands held 30 
million caribou “with the wind blowing 
through their whiskers.” That figure 
haunted successive generations of cari- 
bou biologists who knew that the ranges 
involved were unlikely to have held one- 
tenth that many animals. 
Much of the mystery of caribou 
movement and numbers began to disap- 
pear when biologists were able to survey 
and census from the air. Development 
and use of bush aircraft, on skiis in 
winter and floats in summer, made all 
the caribou ranges safely and quickly 
accessible by the 1930s. Caribou and 
the Barren-lands draws primarily on 
knowledge gained during the past thirty 
years by scientists using air transport. 
Profusely illustrated with the author’s 
own superb photographs, the book must 
not be relegated to the “coffee table” 
category. Sponsored by the Canadian 
Arctic Resources Committee, Calef’s 
book makes a strong plea for the conser- 
vation of the caribou while providing 
exhaustive information about the life 
cycle, ecology, and management of this 
remarkable animal. 
Part I is devoted to a year in the life of 
the caribou, and describes in great detail 
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