Canadian Wilds: Tells About the Hudson's Bay Company, Northern Indians and Their Modes of Hunting, Trapping, Etc.Hunter, Martin
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Canadian Wilds: Tells About the Hudson's Bay Company, Northern Indians and Their Modes of Hunting, Trapping, Etc.
Hunter, Martin
Hudson's Bay Company; Hunting -- Canada
As soon as the deer feels this foreign weight on his back the cruel
teeth cutting into him, he at once runs into and through the thickest
part of the forest trying to rub the incubus off his back. But the
carcajo has the tenacity of the bulldog, and his own skin would be
ripped and lacerated before he would let go his hold.
The deer, realizing this mad rush through the bush is useless, makes
for the nearest water in the hope that this will rid him of his
enemy. But vain hope, the wolverine is there to stop, and only opens
his jaws when the deer is dead, or, as in my instance, through fear
for his personal safety.
Our beaver hunt was spoilt for that night, so we moved back on the
trail and camped. There we passed our time drying the deer's meat and
skinning the Indian devil.
* * *
The amount of destructiveness contained in a full grown wolverine,
or, as he is sometimes called, carcajo and Indian devil, is something
past belief to any one who has not lived in the country in which they
resort. The tales told by hunters and lumbermen of the doings of this
strong and able beast would fill pages. Some of these, like fish
stories, may be seasoned by a pinch of salt, therefore I will only
jot down a few that I experienced personally in my trapping days.
Hunger cannot always be adduced as a reason for their thieving
propensities, inasmuch as they will steal martens, rabbits and
partridges out of traps and snares when they are full to repletion
just out of pure cussedness, as it were, to make the owner of the
traps and snares to use unseeming language.
When once a wolverine gets on a line of deadfalls the trapper has
either to abandon his traps and seek new fields, or kill the
mischievous animal, for even should the line be ten miles long the
Indian Devil will destroy or put out of order each trap to the very
end. Their favorite plan is to tear out the back of the trap. If they
find a marten caught and they are not hungry, they will carry it off
at right angles to the trail and bury it in the snow, or climb a tree
and deposit it on a cross branch. I have found no fewer than three
martens when visiting my trap road a day after the wolverine had
passed.
Once when chum and I were off for a couple of nights from our main
camp, on our return we missed a toboggan from in front of the shanty
door. This was passing strange as no Indians were in the vicinity,
nor had passed our way. Hunt as we did in every conceivable place did
not produce the missing sled. It was only two years after when
camping in the same place and felling a dry spruce for firewood that
the toboggan and tree came to earth together. The mystery was solved,
a wolverine had drawn it up in the top branches of the tree and left
it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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