Mrs. Loudon's Entertaining Naturalist: Being popular descriptions, tales, and anecdotes of more than Five Hundred Animals.Loudon, Mrs. (Jane)
General
Mrs. Loudon's Entertaining Naturalist: Being popular descriptions, tales, and anecdotes of more than Five Hundred Animals.
Loudon, Mrs. (Jane)
Animals -- Juvenile literature; Zoology -- Juvenile literature
IS found in most of the northern regions of Europe, Asia, and America,
and its general height is about four feet and a half. The colour is
brown above and white beneath; but as the animal advances in age, it
often becomes of a greyish white. The hoofs are long, large, and black.
Both sexes are furnished with horns, but those of the male are much the
largest. To the Laplanders this animal supplies the place of the horse,
the cow, the goat, and the sheep; it is their only wealth. The milk
affords them cheese; the flesh, food; the skin, clothing; of the tendons
they make bowstrings, and when split, thread; of the horns, glue; and of
the bones, spoons. During the winter, the Reindeer supplies the want of
a horse, and draws sledges with amazing swiftness over the frozen lakes
and rivers, or over the snow, which at that time covers the whole
country. Innumerable are the uses, the comforts, and advantages which
the poor inhabitants of this dreary climate derive from this animal. We
cannot sum them up better than in the beautiful language of the poet:
“Their Rein-deer form their riches. These their tents,
Their robes, their beds, and all their homely wealth Supply, their wholesome fare, and cheerful cups:
Obsequious at their call, the docile tribe
Yield to the sled their necks, and whirl them swift
O’er hill and dale, heaped into one expanse
Of marbled snow, as far as eye can sweep,
With a blue crest of ice unbounded glazed.”
The mode of hunting the wild Rein-deer by the Laplanders, the Esquimaux,
and the Indians of North America, has been accurately described by late
travellers. Captain Franklin gives the following interesting account of
the mode practised by the Dog-rib Indians, to kill these animals. “The
hunters go in pairs, the foremost man carrying in one hand the horns and
part of the skin of the head of a Deer, and in the other a small bundle
of twigs, against which he, from time to time, rubs the horns, imitating
the gestures peculiar to the animal. His comrade follows, treading
exactly in his footsteps, and holding the guns of both in a horizontal
position, so that the muzzles project under the arms of him who carries
the head. Both hunters have a fillet of white skin round their
foreheads, and the foremost has a strip of the same round his wrists.
They approach the herd by degrees, raising their legs very slowly, but
setting them down somewhat suddenly, after the manner of a Deer, and
always taking care to lift their right or left feet simultaneously. If
any of the herd leave off feeding to gaze upon this extraordinary
phenomenon, it instantly stops, and the head begins to play its part, by
licking its shoulders, and performing other necessary movements. In this
way the hunters attain the very centre of the herd without exciting
suspicion, and have leisure to single out the fattest. The hindmost man
then pushes forward his comrade’s gun, the head is dropped, and they
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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