22 
MUSEUM BULLETIN NO. 6. 
them, and carefully avoid their haunts. Besides, the white men 
usually had boats and always sought to follow routes where wood 
could be had for fuel; this confined them to the wooded valleys 
of the Coppermine, Kendall, and Dease, all of which (in so far as 
they are wooded) the Eskimo pretty rigidly avoid, through fear 
of the Indians. A journey made the summer of 1910 along the 
routes of Dease and Simpson, Richardson, Rae, or Hanbury 
would have revealed not a single Eskimo, nor would a coasting 
voyage of Great Bear lake have done so either. The Eskimo 
frequent the barren highlands, camp usually among mottled 
boulders where their mottled little tents are seldom discernible 
with the naked eye at over half a mile; they do not often make 
fire and never make large ones, and they keep a remarkably keen 
watch day and night, always ready to flee on hearing the report 
of a gun or seeing a man, a smoke, or a fresh trail or other sign 
of human presence. Even after we had been with them four 
months it was hard to keep them from fleeing precipitately on 
sighting a tipi camp, which proved to be that of the English 
travellers Melvill and Hornby (September, 1910), near the east- 
ern treeline of the Dease river. 
The Eskimo themselves say they “always" hunted to the 
shore of Great Bear lake (eastern part of the north shore of Mc- 
Tavish bay). The oldest of the active hunters (perhaps 45 or 
50 years old) told us that, when they first remember, people in 
greater number than now used to hunt to the lake shore. Some 
had never seen signs of the immediate presence of Indians; one 
man had twice been in a party which had had occasion to flee 
from the very beach of the lake — once on hearing the report of 
a gun; another time on seeing smoke. (It may have been 
through hearsay from Hudson bay that they were able to identify 
the report of a gun as a sign of the nearness of Indians, for this 
happened when a man now forty years old, at least, was a small 
boy, and most of them had never seen a gun fired until we hunted 
with them. It is possible, of course, that the memory of fire- 
arms was preserved by the Pallifmiut ( ?) whom Richardson and 
Rae met some fifty years ago). 
As the object is woodgathering rather than trade, the people 
who frequent the district never have occasion to come together 
