45 
len goods the Indians required the furs of the wild animals to protect 
them from the rigorous winter. The Hurons used their surplus 
maize to purchase furs from the Ottawa; but generally the men of 
the agricultural tribes left the tillage of the fields to the women in 
order that they might spend the summer in fishing, and the wdnter 
in hunting the moose. Fish and game, even though they were per- 
haps not as plentiful in their territories as in other parts of the 
Dominion, effectively reinforced the products of the soil, and by 
ensuring a certain livelihood at every season of the year, placed the 
agricultural tribes in a far more favourable position economically 
than the tribes that, knowing no agriculture, lived by fishing and 
the chase alone. 
Fortunately for the non-agricultural tribes, no country in the 
world possessed a richer land and sea fauna than Canada in the days 
preceding its discovery. The coasts of both the Pacific and the 
Atlantic oceans teemed with salmon of various species that annually 
migrated up the rivers to their spawning-grounds. So densely did 
they mass in certain years that many fish were pushed high and dry 
upon the banks. Both oceans, too, abounded in shell-fish, and in 
halibut and cod, while of sea- mammals there were seals, whales, and 
walruses on the Atlantic coast, seals, whales, sea-lions, and sea-otters 
on the Pacific. Even the ice-strewn waters of the Arctic, where the 
Eskimo fished and hunted, had its seals, whales, and w^alruses, its 
cod and its salmon-trout, the last often reaching a weight of eleven 
and sometimes fourteen pounds. The interior lakes contained white- 
fish and sturgeon, lake-trout, salmon-trout, pike, pickerel, and other 
species of lesser economic value. Equally abundant was the land 
fauna. Bears, deer, and rabbits (or hares) were common everywhere. 
The moose, the woodland caribou, and the porcupine tenanted the 
eastern forested area; huge herds of bison and of antelope roamed 
the plains; the mountains of the west sheltered sheep and goats, elk 
wandered in their foothills and mountain caribou grazed on the 
plateaux between the various ranges; moose and deer haunted the 
Pacific coast; and throughout the northland of Canada east of the 
iNTackenzie river there were small bands of musk-oxen, and herds of 
caribou so immense that no man could estimate their numbers. 
Innumerable wild-fowl, too, made the Dominion their breeding- 
ground, and ducks, geese, swans, grouse, and ptarmigan all con- 
