Although the prairie form of the country is not altogether the best for stalking, yet one could stalk comparatively near a herd before turning the dogs loose. The Indians never do this, and, in addition, the dogs set up a yelping and a howling the moment they catch sight of the quarry. This, of course, starts off the musk-oxen, which invariably choose the roughest part of the country, no doubt feeling, and rightly, too, that their pursuers will have the more difficult time following. Indian dogs are not always to be relied upon, for they have a disposition to hunt in a group, and your entire bunch of dogs is apt to stop and hold only three or four stragglers of the herd while the remainder of the musk-oxen escape. Sometimes when they stop practically the entire herd, the dogs are very likely, before you come up to them, to shift, leaving their original position and gradually drawing together; perhaps, the whole pack of dogs finally holding only half a dozen, while the rest of the musk-oxen have run on. Musk-oxen, when stopped, invariably form a circle with their sterns in and their heads out; it matters not whether the herd is thirty or half a dozen, their action is the same. If there are only two, they stand stern to stern, facing out. I have seen a single musk-ox back up against a rock. Apparently they feel safe only when they get their sterns up against something.
Hunting musk-oxen on the Arctic Coast or the Arctic islands after the manner of the polar expeditions, is a much simpler proposition. There the hunters are always comparatively near their base of supplies, and, from all accounts, the musk-oxen are more numerous than they are in the interior. According to Frederick Schwatka, the Innuits hunt musk-oxen with great skill. They hitch their dogs to the sledge differently from the method of the Indians to the south. The southern Indians hitch their four dogs in tandem between two common traces, one on each side; while each Eskimo dog has his own single trace, which is hitched independently to the sledge. When the Innuits sight the musk-oxen, each hunter takes the dogs of his sledge, and holding their traces in his hand, starts after the game. The wisdom of this method is twofold: in the first place it immeasurably aids the running hunter, for the four or five straining dogs practically pull him along; indeed, Schwatka says that when these Innuits come to a hill they squat and slide down, throwing themselves at full length upon the snow of the ascending bank, up which the excited dogs drag them without any effort on the part of the hunter. I should like to add here that if such a plan were pursued in the Barren Grounds over the rocky ridges, the remains of the hunter would not be interested in musk-ox hunting by the time the top of a ridge was reached. Seriously, the chief value of hunting in this style is that the hunter controls his four to six dogs, the usual number of the Eskimo sledge. When they have caught up with the musk-ox herd, he then looses them and he is there to begin action. The Eskimo dogs are very superior in breed to those used by the Indians farther south, and are trained as well to run mute.
The chances of getting musk-oxen in the Barren Grounds are not so good in summer as in winter, because travelling by canoe you are, of course, bound to keep to the chain of lakes, and your course is therefore prescribed, it being impossible to travel over the land at will as it is in winter when all is frozen. One day’s hunting is about like another. There is nothing to kindle the eye of the nature lover. In winter it is like travelling over a great frozen sea; in summer it is a great desolate waste of moss and lichen, dotted with lakes and rock-topped ridges, which observe no one or special form of direction. There is a black moss that the Indians sometimes burn if they can find it dry enough, and a little shrub that furnishes a bitter tea if the tea of civilization has run out. Nearly all of the lakes have fish, and a hunter ought really, with experience and judgment, to go in and out in summer time without suffering any excessive starvation. Warburton Pike, who has studied the Barren Grounds in summer time more thoroughly than any other man living, reports spots covered with wild flowers that grow to no height but in comparative profusion and some beauty.
The distance you make in a summer day of Barren Grounds travel may depend entirely on your inclination, for with the fish and the moving caribou you are fairly well assured against hunger, and the weather is comparatively warm and permits of lingering along the route. It is quite another story in the winter, for then food is always a problem, and every day draws on your slender supply of wood. Of course the farther you penetrate, the nearer you get to the Arctic Coast, the more likely you are to see musk-oxen; and the faster you travel, of course, the farther you can penetrate. We averaged about twenty miles a day. That means that we kept busy every hour from the time we started until we camped. The hour of starting depended very largely upon whether or not there was a moon. If there was a moon, we would get started so as to be well under way by daylight, which when we first entered the Barren Grounds would be about nine o’clock. If there was no moon, we waited for daylight. There always was a moon unless it stormed; but it stormed most of the time. When there was a moon, however, it was always full. Travelling from Lac La Biche to Great Slave Lake on the frozen rivers, where it was a mere question of getting from one post to another, we used to start about two o’clock in the morning, the sun coming up about ten o’clock and setting at about three, and darkness falling almost immediately thereafter. In this river travelling I averaged a full thirty-five miles a day for the (about) nine hundred miles.
MUSK-OXEN ON CAPE MORRIS JESUP (88° 39´ North Lat.). BROUGHT TO BAY BY DOGS MAY 17th, 1900
The animals are within a quarter of a mile of the extreme northern limit of the most northerly land on the globe. Photograph by courtesy of Robert E. Peary, by whose expedition it was taken.
The Author’s Barren Ground Hunting Knife and Ax (14 inches long)