Fish, which are available in abundance nearly everywhere, would serve
well enough for both fox bait and dog feed. But the average trapper
prefers to secure Caribou--a less laborious matter than putting up a
winter’s supply of fish; at the same time he may admit that fish are
easier to handle in feeding and are preferable from that point of view.
Charles Schweder has rarely found Caribou along his trap-line between
the upper Kazan River and Dubawnt Lake. By using fish (out of the Little
Dubawnt River) for fox bait, he avoids the necessity of making an early
fall trip over that long distance to secure Caribou for his winter
operations. A trapper from northern Manitoba informed me that the local
Indians were complying with a recent government regulation that each
owner must put up a certain number of fish for the consumption of his
dogs--but, they were still feeding them with Caribou. The Split Lake
band of Indians on the Nelson River, Manitoba, were reported to have
killed 4,000 of the animals during the winter of 1946-47; the greater
part of these were utilized ingloriously as dog feed.
The hunting of such an extraordinarily unwary animal as the Barren
Ground Caribou calls for extremely little skill. Scarcely anything more
is required of the hunter (at least in southwestern Keewatin) than to
place himself on their line of march and to await their arrival. No
concealment is necessary, but quick movements are to be avoided, and the
direction of the wind should be such that it will not carry the dread
human scent to the animals. Even in perfectly open terrain one may
generally walk slowly up to within shooting distance of resting Caribou.
But if they are on the march and have already gone past, the hunter may
not succeed in getting close to them. Pursuing them on the run is likely
to send them off in a panic. (There is some evidence that on the Arctic
Coast and in the Barren Grounds of Mackenzie, where hunters are probably
more numerous than in southwestern Keewatin, the Caribou are usually
much more wary--_cf._ Amundsen, 1908, +1+: 103; Stefánsson, 1913b:
278; Blanchet, 1925: 34; Ingstad, 1933: 88.) In the section on
_Disposition_ the destruction of about a quarter of a herd of 100 or
more by a single hunter is described. On September 9 an Eskimo boy
killed 13. On November 3 eight out of a herd of 50 were secured by
another hunter in a few minutes’ time. During the autumn migration of
1947 one of the Eskimos on the upper Kazan had killed 85 before the end
of September. This band of Eskimos is said to have once slaughtered 500
animals, half of them in the river, where they did not even bother to
pull them out; they had killed for the sheer delight of killing rather
than for utilization. It is customary for them to spear more animals
than they shoot. A trader’s family in the Nueltin Lake region used to
kill 500 Caribou per year for their own use and for their 23 dogs. In
one instance a number of Caribou were shot from across a river; several
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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