As regards the nature of the pelage, or fur, for it is almost such, of the Cariboo, so far from its being, as the wiseacre of the Encyclopædia states, remarkable for closeness and compactness, it is by all odds the loosest and longest haired of any deer I ever saw; being, particularly about the head and neck, so shaggy as to appear almost maned. In color, it is the most grizzly of deer, and though comparatively dark brown on the back, the hide is generally speaking light, almost dun colored, and on the head and neck fulvous, or tawny gray, largely mixed with white hairs. The flesh is said to be delicious; and the leather made by the Indians from its skin, by their peculiar process, is of unsurpassed excellence for leggings, moccasons or the like; especially for the moccason to be used under snow-shoes. As to its habits, while the Lapland or Siberian Reindeer is the tamest and most docile of its genus, the American Cariboo is the fiercest, fleetest, wildest, shyest and most untameable. So much so, that they are rarely pursued by white hunters, or shot by them, except through casual good-fortune; Indians alone having the patience and instinctive craft, which enables them to crawl on them unseen, unsmelt—for the nose of the Cariboo can detect the smallest taint upon the air of any thing human at least two miles up wind of him—and unsuspected. If he take alarm and start off on the run, no one dreams of pursuing. As well pursue the wind, of which no man knoweth whence it cometh or whither it goeth. Snow-shoes against him alone avail nothing, for propped up on the broad, natural snow-shoes of his long, elastic pasterns and wide-cleft clacking hoofs, he shoots over the thinnest crust, over the deepest drifts, unbroken; in which the lordly moose would soon flounder, shoulder-deep, if hard pressed, and the graceful deer would fall despairing, and bleat in vain for mercy—but he, the ship of the winter wilderness, outspeeds the wind among his native pines and tamaracks—even as the desert ship, the dromedary, outtrots the red simoom on the terrible Zahara—and once started, may be seen no more by human eyes, nor run down by fleetest feet of man, no, not if they pursue him from their nightly-casual camps, unwearied, following his trail by the day, by the week, by the month, till a fresh snow efface his tracks, and leave the hunter at the last, as he was at the first of the chase; less only the fatigue, the disappointment and the folly.