Northern Trails. Book I 
viii 
(i) The lower chest of a deer, between and just behind the fore¬ 
legs, is thin and wedge-shaped, exactly as I stated, and the point 
of the heart is well down in this narrow wedge. The distance 
through the chest and point of the heart from side to side was, 
in this case, exactly four and one-half inches. A man’s hand, 
as shown in the photograph, can easily grasp the whole lower 
chest of a deer, placing thumb and forefinger over the heart on 
opposite sides. (2) The heart of a deer, and indeed of all rumi¬ 
nant animals, lies close against the chest walls and is easily 
reached and wounded. The chest cartilage, except in an old deer, 
is soft; the ribs are thin and easily crushed, and the spaces 
between the ribs are wide enough to admit a man’s finger, to say 
nothing of a wolf’s fang. In this case the point of the heart, as 
the deer lay on his side, was barely five eights of an inch from 
the surface. (3) Any dog or wolf, therefore, having a spread of 
jaws of four and one-half inches, and fangs three quarters of an 
inch long, could easily grasp the chest of this deer from beneath 
and reach the heart from either side. As the jaws of the big 
northern wolf spread from six to eight inches and his fangs are 
over an inch long, to kill a deer in this way would require but a 
slight effort. The chest of a caribou is anatomically exactly like 
that of other deer ; only the caribou fawn and yearling of “ North¬ 
ern Trails ” have smaller chests than the animals I measured. 
So much for the facts and the possibilities. As for specific 
instances, years ago I found a deer just killed in the snow and 
beside him the fresh tracks of a big wolf, which had probably 
been frightened away at my approach. The deer was bitten just 
behind and beneath the left shoulder, and one long fang had 
entered the heart. There was not another scratch on the body, 
so far as I could discover. I thought this very exceptional at 
the time; but years afterwards my Indian guide in the interior 
