As we had only a few things to get before starting out for the famous caribou country between the head waters of the Hole, the Askandoga and the Blood Vein rivers, we were not delayed long at this place. The snow was now quite heavy, at least enough so for comfortable snowshoe traveling, and we made rapid time after leaving the Bad Throat River. In this connection it is to be remarked that comparatively little snow falls in this region. This seems singular, and I do not know the meteorological explanation of the fact. There is certainly very much less, for instance, than in Minnesota, hundreds of miles to the south. The snow, however, is usually a dry powder all through winter, and very rarely becomes crusted.
In traveling over broken timbered country with dog-sleds, very much the same routes are followed that one takes with a canoe in summer—that is to say, you avoid the rough country by traveling on the rivers, which are usually covered with thick ice, or over the same portages that are used in summer. It was necessary for either Penrose, Keller or myself to lead the way with our snowshoes, while the others took care of the dog-sleds behind. The dogs followed accurately in the trail beaten out by our snowshoes for them.
The country on this side of the lake, unlike that of the west, is very rough, rocky and rugged, and especially so near the lake shore. It is quite thickly timbered. As one advances into the interior, however, this aspect changes, so that the country near the height of land is more open, and there are long stretches of nearly level country traversed by rocky, moss-covered and roughly parallel ridges. There is more or less timber on these ridges, and in the so-called muskegs between them. This is the country which the caribou seem to prefer.
After about two weeks' hard traveling, we reached the country which had been recommended to us and came upon great abundance of caribou sign. In fact, there were millions of tracks, but, curiously enough, no caribou were to be seen. We afterward found that they had been driven out by a lot of wolves, which probably had followed them down from the north. While this explanation was interesting, it was not productive of any great amount of satisfaction to the party, for we had been counting definitely upon fresh meat, and so had our dogs. At least, after doing the terrific work necessary to make this journey, it is fair to presume that they had counted upon being fed, and not being left to starve miserably while tied to a tree.
To add to our hardships, our Indian tepee, made of canvas, began to smoke so excessively as to cause us the greatest discomfort, and we all thought we had pneumonia; but afterward concluded it was nothing but irritation of the lungs, due to breathing pine smoke a good many hours each day. In fact, it was almost unbearable. An Indian tepee of this kind, properly made by a squaw, is beyond doubt the most comfortable of all hunting tents in any respectable climate; but in a climate of 40 degrees below zero it is an abomination. We used frequently to crawl into our sheep-skin sleeping bags, wrap several blankets around the bags and put the fire out, merely to get relief from the annoyance of the smoke. In the morning the steam which arose from our bodies, and from the meal which we might be cooking, got mixed up with the smoke, so that it was impossible to distinguish each other when four feet apart. In fact, we were sometimes inclined to think that the dogs on the outside were better off than ourselves, though the appearance they presented in the morning was not such as to cause us to wish to change places with them. They were each tied by a short chain to the pine trees about the camp, and after a night of low temperature there were to be seen in the morning only twelve white mounds of snow; not that any snow had fallen during the night, or that the dogs had crawled underneath that already on the ground. Their white appearance was simply due to the dense coating of frost which had been produced from the condensation caused by the heat of their bodies. It must not be forgotten, however, that they are as hardy and as well able to withstand this rigorous climate as the wolves, from which many of them are directly descended. All of the so-called "huskies" are of this type.
Altogether things were not very pleasant about this time. Our Christmas Day rations consisted of one small roll each with a little coffee for breakfast, and in the evening each man was given a small piece of rabbit.
The rabbits in this country were unfortunately not as abundant as they were on the opposite side of the lake, where the Indian boy one day went out with one of our rifles to visit his rabbit snares and to shoot rabbits for the dogs. Before long we heard him shoot four times. He came back to camp with eight rabbits, which had certainly been killed with the rifle, none of them having been snared.
Those of us who were able to hunt at all hunted with the greatest perseverance, but with little success, until finally some one brought in the report that caribou had been seen, and in a very few days the country again contained numbers of them.
One morning, shortly after the first caribou had been seen, Keller, who had been quite sick, was unable longer to tolerate the smoke of the tepee, and took a little walk with his rifle close around our camp. He soon came upon the fresh trail of a bunch of caribou. He had followed it only a few hundred yards when he saw one of the caribou lying down. He is a dead shot, the best I have ever known in my life. He carefully steadied himself, raised his .45-90 Winchester, aimed at the caribou lying down and fired. When he went up to look at it, to his amazement, he came across another dead caribou, between the spot where he had fired and the one at which he had aimed. It had been shot straight through the temples. On going further, he found the other caribou shot exactly where he had aimed at it, some twenty yards distant from the first one. The only possible way in which he could explain this remarkable occurrence is that the caribou which had been shot through the head, and which he had not seen, had risen out of its bed just as he was in the act of firing and interposed his head directly in the line of fire. The fact of having fresh meat in camp, of course, brought great joy to us all, and especially to the semi-starved dogs. As in the case of killing the first moose, it seemed to have the effect of changing our luck, for we afterward killed a number of caribou, although we were not successful in getting good heads.
These caribou are totally different from the moose in the kind of food they live upon and in their general habits. They prefer a different sort of a country, the two rarely being found together. They spend much of their time in the muskegs, which seem to be characteristic of all of that region of the country; but these muskegs are not open, like those on the west side of the lake, being more or less covered with a growth of stubby jack pine, from which usually hangs an abundance of long gray moss. The caribou feed upon this moss, while the moose, on the other hand, are fond of the tender sprouts of the red and gray willow. The caribou, however, are often found on the rocky ridges, where they find good feed on the moss growing upon the rocks. Indeed, they seem to have no settled place of abode, like moose, being probably one of the most restless animals on the face of the earth. They seem to be always on the move. Unlike the moose, they are very inquisitive, in this respect being more like the antelope than any other animal. They are found singly, or in twos or threes, or in small bunches of ten to twenty, but often in great herds of a hundred or perhaps a thousand. They spend a great deal of their time on the lakes in the winter, where they play with each other like kittens. They are wonderfully quick in their actions. They are also very sure of their footing, and we saw a number of places in the snow where they had slid down quite steep rocks for some distance, probably by putting their four feet close together. Great herds often come down from the region on the western shore of Hudson Bay and return the following summer.