Fort Fond du Lac (east end of Lake Athabaska) is stated by Mr. Tyrrell in the same report to be “on one of the principal lines of travel of the Barren Ground caribou, in their regular migrations north and south.”
In the report of his expedition down the Dubawnt valley and Chesterfield inlet in 1893, Mr. Tyrrell mentions that his party first saw caribou (he calls them Rangifer Grœnlandicus) on July 28 on Barlow lake, “and on July 29, we met a vast herd of Barren Ground caribou collected on a good feeding ground on the eastern shore of Carey lake.”
Mr. Tyrrell gives the following details:—“Four miles below Barlow lake, the river Dubawnt enters the south end of Carey lake, so called in honour of the Reverend Doctor Carey of St. John, N.B. After paddling up the lake for five miles, directing our course towards a high point with a large boulder on its summit, afterwards called Cairn point, we saw
An Immense Herd of Caribou
(Rangifer Grœnlandicus) moving along the east shore. We at once paddled towards the land, and found the deer standing on low wet grassy land near the water, at the foot of a long stony slope.
“The following extract from my daily journal, with the photographs in the front of the report, will give a fairly clear idea of the number of deer seen:—
“July 30.—Yesterday was the first clear warm day that we have had for a long time, but to day is also clear and warm, with a gentle breeze blowing from the west. We spent the day skinning and cutting up the fattest of the bucks we killed yesterday. Our camp is a hundred yards from the lake, near the edge of a bog, with a scattered grove of larch and black spruce just behind us. All day the caribou have been around us in vast numbers, many thousands being collected together in single herds. One herd collected in the hill behind our camp, and another remained for hours in the wet bog on the point in front of us. The little fawns were running about everywhere, often coming up to within a yard or two of us, uttering their sharp grunts as they stood and looked up at us, or as they turned and ran back to the does. About noon a large herd had collected on the sides and summit of the hill behind us. Taking the small hand camera with which we were supplied, we walked quietly among them. As we approached to within a few yards of the dense herd, it opened to let us in, and then formed a circle round us, so that we were able to stand for a couple of hours and watch the deer as they stood in the light breeze or rubbed slowly past each other to keep off the black flies. The bucks, with their beautiful branching antlers, kept well in the background. We obtained a number of photographs, which show the animals in many positions; later in the afternoon a herd of bucks trotted up to us, and stood at about forty yards distance. This was a most beautiful sight, for their horns are now full grown, though still soft at the tips, but unfortunately we had not the camera with us. We did not shoot any to-day.”
In his paper before the British Association in 1897 Mr. Tyrrell said that this herd at Carey lake must have contained between one and
Two Hundred Thousand Head of Caribou.
They were migrating southward towards the edge of the woods, where they would spend the winter.