Jan. 28, 1911.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
129 
could reach the river before nightfall, and the 
rest of the way mattered very little, as even at 
night there would be light enough to enable us 
to follow our river tracks of the day before. 
We started, but had not reached the edge of 
the barren before the unexpected happened. 
Right in front of us and'coming toward us down 
wind appeared two caribou. We threw ourselves 
to the ground and waited. They came on un¬ 
suspectingly straight toward us. One of them 
had nice antlers and the other was a spike horn. 
I wanted the one with the antlers and paid no 
attention to the other. At about seventy-five 
yards away the larger animal stopped. One shot 
tumbled him over, a second stopped his kicking, 
and we got up and started for the prostrate 
caribou. 1 he unwounded beast was examining 
his mate with much interest, and strange to say 
when we rose he appeared equally interested in 
us. Not till we were within fifty feet or so 
did he catch our scent, and then with a loud 
whouff he was off like a shot. I have never 
attribute the trouble to me, though he saw me 
perfectly because I got up and walked toward 
him. He just kept about the same distance away, 
trotting off and then turning around and facing 
me again in an endeavor I should say to deter¬ 
mine what sort of an animal I was. He was such 
a fool that I did not have the heart to kill him. 
It must be borne in mind that the foregoing ex¬ 
periences took place on barren ground. When 
once a caribou gets into the woods, it is hard 
enough to approach him. 
Pascal and I determined that whatever hap¬ 
pened we would carry a load down with us. I 
wanted to get the head mounted, but had no 
time to do more than chop it off at the neck, 
leaving a sufficient amount of the hide. Pascal 
strapped this securely to my back. He then 
took the two hind quarters, rolled them in the 
rest of the hide and made a sack of it, looping 
the hmd leg parts so ,as to pass over his shoul¬ 
ders and under his arms as straps, and fasten¬ 
ing the ends to the hide with nails as pins, a 
of the brook. When he was extricated I found 
he was badly wrenched by the sack he was carry¬ 
ing, and one of his feet had gone into a water 
hole, wetting it thoroughly. 
I suggested leaving our packs here to be col¬ 
lected another day, and making a fire to dry 
his socks as soon as we could find dry wood and 
birch bark, but he was in an ugly, determined 
mood after his tumble, and said his sack was 
going to the river if it took till morning, so I 
determined to hang on to mine. It was not very 
cold and I am sure he did not imagine his foot 
was in any danger of freezing; in fact, he ad¬ 
mitted this later. 
The brook being too dangerous, we now took 
to the woods, and here my troubles began. 
Pascal was piloting and I followed blindly. It 
was so dark that sometimes I could not see him 
at all, and occasionally had to guide myself by 
feeling for the depressions his snowshoes made. 
The antlers were continually catching in branches 
and trees and must have thrown me to the 
\ 
THE WIND-SWEPT BARRENS OF THE SHICKSHOCK RANGE. 
Photograph by a friend of Mr. Bignell’s. 
seen anything more foo.ish in a wild animal 
than the manner in which that caribou stood 
looking with the greatest curiosity, first at his 
friend on the ground and then at us. 
In this connection I may say that when cari¬ 
bou are in the open and catch no human scent, 
some of them exhibit as much curiosity as do 
sheep. By bobbing up and down behind a rock 
I have sometimes caused caribou to approach, 
making large half circles as they advanced with 
the evident wish to get the scent of the un¬ 
known object. This applies to occasional in¬ 
dividuals only, for the exercise of the same tac¬ 
tics will cause others to make off at once. The 
latter I suppose have already been 'hunted, or 
they are perhaps wise old fellows of a naturally 
cautious disposition. The only effect which the 
report of a rifle produces on them is to lead 
them to look in all directions, with ears alert, 
as if to see what has caused the sound. The 
wounding or killing of one out of an assembled 
company seems to arouse no sentiment save curi¬ 
osity among the others, and a hunter could pot 
an entire band—one after the other—provided 
he kept out of smell and sight. Indeed, as I 
have already shown, there are instances when 
to keep out of smell is all that is necessary. I 
have wounded a caribou to the extent of making 
him limp visibly, and still he did not appear to 
heavy load even for a man of his remarkable 
capacity. It was now 4 o’clock and we started 
off with all speed. We found Pascal’s little lake 
and its tiny outlet, which, however, soon widened 
into a respectable brook owing to its augmenta¬ 
tion by other sources. 
It was mostly good going on the frozen brook, 
though from time to time we had to leave it 
owing to bad or open places. It was a race 
between us and nightfall, and some time before 
we got clear of the mountain and into the river 
flats we began to see that nightfall would win 
easily. It began to get darker and darker under 
the trees, and by the time we were a mile from 
the river, we could no longer distinguish the bad 
places on the brook, and thus misfortune over¬ 
took Pascal. 
If you have ever tried walking over the snow 
in the dark, you will know that no matter what 
the formation of the territory in front of you, 
everything looks white and level, so that you 
may suddenly step off a fifteen-foot embankment 
where you were certain your foot was going on 
solid ground. This is what happened to Pascal. 
He was walking in front when suddenly his 
shadowy form disappeared from my view alto¬ 
gether, and I heard much forcible and descrip¬ 
tive language from quite a distance below me. 
He had walked off an embankment at the edge 
ground twenty to thirty times in addition to the 
other falls I got during that last mile or so 
from not being able to distinguish objects and 
fallen trees in the road. I would gladly have 
changed my antlers for the heavier sack, or 
thrown them away, but I was younger then than 
I am now and would not give in as long as 
Pascal hung to his own load. 
When we got into some second growth stuff 
of tangled balsam, however, I reached the point 
of exhaustion from the various falls, wrenches 
and whacks which I continually had to endure, 
and hunger was making things worse. Finally 
my brain started to play me funny tricks. ‘Dark 
forms began to move about in the woods, and 
when I fell down I took more interest in the 
affair as an onlooker than as an actual partici¬ 
pant. 
It was the end of January and the days were 
getting comparatively long. We had started at 
day break, done a four hours’ heavy climb, had 
been running, crawling or working all day with 
the exception of the time we had watched the 
caribou, had eaten only one ship biscuit each and 
had finally made this last dash for the river, a 
dash which represented several hours of struggle 
and which ended in darkness and for me in ever¬ 
lasting entanglement with the antlers. 
Wrenching, pulling, falling, getting up again. 
