The Barren Ground of Northern Canada

by Warburton Pike

On the following day we made an easy day's travel to the east, and most of us succeeded in killing caribou while the women drove the dogs. From this time, all through the summer till we again reached the Great Slave Lake late in August, we had no difficulty about provisions; although there was many a time when we could not say where we might find our next meal, something always turned up, and we were never a single day without eating during the whole journey. I really believe it is a mistake to try to carry enough food for a summer's work in the Barren Ground, as the difficulty of transport is so great, and after the caribou are once found there is no danger of starvation.

We were now travelling with the bull caribou, which had just left the thick woods, and made easy marches from lake to lake in an north-east direction; the weather became cold again for the last time, and June 7th was like a bad winter's day with a strong north wind and snowstorms. Then the summer came suddenly, and on the 11th we were obliged to camp on a high gravel ridge to await le grand dégel, which rendered travelling impossible, till the deep water had run off the ice. Although we had been so far taking it very easily, a rest was of great service, as many of the party were suffering from acute snow-blindness caused by the everlasting glare of the sun on the treeless waste; there was no dark object to rest the eyes upon for a moment, and besides the actual pain the constant inflammation injured the sight and made rifle-shooting very uncertain. The Indians smeared their faces with blood and wood-ashes, and the white men were further protected with spectacles; but these efforts were only partially successful in keeping off the glare. I was lucky in getting off quite free myself, but should imagine that it must be a most painful affliction.

Along the foot of the sandy ridge, which closely resembled the one I had seen the autumn before at Lac de Gras, were many small lakes partially thawed, and here the snow geese, or white "wavies," were resting in thousands, waiting till the warm weather should have melted the snow from their feeding-ground along the sea-coast. We could have made enormous bags of them, as they were tame and disinclined to leave the open water; but we were sparing with our ammunition, as we might want it badly later on. Great numbers were killed, however, and their prime condition told of the good feeding-ground they had left far southward. There were also plenty of large Canada geese, but the grey wavy, or laughing goose, the best of all for eating, is much scarcer. Of the more edible ducks the pintail seems to be the only one that comes so far beyond the Great Slave Lake, but long-tailed ducks and golden eyes were in great numbers along this sandy ridge. Of the loons, the red-throated variety was by far the most numerous, and the Pacific or Adam's diver was fairly common, but the great northern diver, although plentiful on the Great Slave Lake, does not appear to visit the Barren Ground.

While we were waiting here, another band of Indians from Fond du Lac caught us up, and our camp assumed still larger proportions; but as we were fairly among the game it did not much matter. With the new arrivals were two blind men, Pierre and Antoine Fat, who preferred a wandering life to the support they would doubtless have been given at the fort. Both were good fishermen, and would spend hours sitting on the ice at the edge of an open hole with the greatest patience, and later on made heavy catches of trout. Pierre would often walk with the hunters to get his share of the meat; Capot Blanc was usually his guide, but seldom did more than trail a stick after him and the blind man followed the sound; when a caribou was killed, Pierre was led up to it, and in spite of his blindness would do the butcher's work cleanly and well.

The snow melted away rapidly; the hillsides were running with small streams, the ground showed up in ever increasing patches, and a thick mist, which the Indians say always appears at the time of the big thaw, hung over everything. On June 16th we found that most of the water had run off through the cracks in the ice, and resumed our journey, after solemnly burning some thirty pairs of used-up snow-shoes. At first walking without them seemed hard to me, as I had used them continually since the previous October, and we all found that our feet were made sore by walking on the rough ice; unfortunately the skins of the caribou that we killed were so riddled by grubs that they were unfit to dress for leather, and we were always short of moccasins. We still travelled along easily, as the river would not break up for a fortnight at the earliest, and our best plan was to move with the caribou, which seemed to be keeping up with the edge of the snow much in the same manner as ourselves. The portages between the lakes were often three or four miles in length, and, as the snow had gone, we were obliged to carry the heavy loads on our backs; firewood was getting scarce, and I came to the conclusion that our old canoe-route was by far the best way to reach the Barren Ground in summer or in winter. A few warm days made a great difference in the appearance of the country. Leaves began to sprout on the little willows, and the grass showed green on the hillsides; sober-hued flowers, growing close to the ground, came out in bloom, and a few butterflies flapped in the hot sunshine, while we were still walking on eight feet of solid ice. Mosquitos appeared in myriads: in the daytime there was usually a breeze to blow them away, and the nights were too cold for them; but in the calm mornings and evenings they made the most of their chance to annoy us.

On June 25th we planted our lodges on a high ridge overlooking Lake Mackay. It has always been the fashion of the Yellow Knives to camp in an elevated position, in order to have command of the surrounding country in looking out for the caribou, or, in the olden times, for a band of hostile Indians. Right across the lake we could see the bay in which we had left our big canoe during our first attempt to find the musk-ox, and the hills forming the height of land between the Great Slave Lake and the Arctic Sea; on our right lay Lockhart's River and the huge Aylmer Lake, which we were about to cross. Blind Pierre knew the whole picture as well as any of us; on my way back to camp at sundown I found him sitting on a boulder smoking, for we always rather favoured him in the matter of tobacco; his face was turned to the north-east, and he was evidently taking in all the details of the landscape, without the sense of sight. "Tetchenula, Tetchen Yarsula, Tetchen Taote (no wood, not a little wood, no wood at all)," he said, as he waved his hands towards Aylmer Lake; then, with a sweep of his arm, he traced correctly the course of Lockhart's River, with a rapid downward motion, to denote its abrupt termination in a series of rapids and waterfalls as it joins the Great Slave Lake. Poor old fellow, it must be hard for him not to see the country he loves so well; but he is happy, after his fashion, in the summer-time when the caribou are thick.

From this point we sent Moise with three Indians and our own dogs to bring up the big canoe from the south shore of Lake Mackay, where I had left her in the beginning of last October. Many little hunting-canoes had been picked up along the track from Fond du Lac, and now every sleigh carried a canoe athwartships; these proved useful enough in crossing the small lake in the course of Lockhart's River, as on arriving at the far side we found open water between us and the land, and had to use the canoes to ferry our cargo to the shore, the dogs swimming with the empty sleighs in tow, while some enterprising spirits, who conceived the idea of floating ashore on blocks of ice, came in for a ducking. The ice on Aylmer Lake was still solid, but extremely rough, causing great damage to our moccasins. We kept near the north shore, with sometimes a long traverse across a deep bay; at the head of every bay a stream ran into the lake, and the open water at its mouth was always a sure find for trout; forty or fifty large fish were often caught in a day with hook and line at these places, and, as we could always kill caribou, even the dogs were getting fat in this land of plenty. Soon we began to see scraps of musk-ox hair on the large boulders where these animals had been rubbing, and on the second day's travel along Aylmer Lake David had an adventure with an old bull. David was by far the keenest hunter in the outfit, but up till now had not succeeded in killing anything bigger than a goose, and it was an exciting moment for him when he got within range of a musk-ox. He had heard strange stories about these animals when a small boy among his own countrymen at the mouth of the Mackenzie River, and it was not without a little trembling that he fired one of his scanty stock of bullets. The beast was wounded but would not die, and David, standing off at a safe distance, soon exhausted all his bullets; he then proceeded to load his gun with round stones, and finally with handfuls of gravel; his last charge of powder was used to fire the ramrod, but another half hour elapsed before the musk-ox expired. As this was the first one that had been killed on this trip, the proud hunter was made a good deal of when he came into camp with the best of the highly-flavoured meat.

On the evening of July 1st we made the encampment at the head of the most northerly bay of Aylmer Lake, named Sandy Bay by Back, from the conspicuous sand-ridges that here form the divide between the lake and the Great Fish River, a distance of three quarters of a mile. The ice was still firm in Aylmer Lake, but there was a little difficulty in getting ashore through a narrow belt of open water, and the head-reaches of the river were clear. We were inspecting the stream, to see what chance there was of being able to run the canoe through the numerous rapids, when Noel, one of the Indians who had been with me on the winter hunt, came up with the news that he had spied a large band of musk-ox feeding a couple of miles down the river. The women were badly in need of their hides for making moccasins, as the caribou-skins were still in poor condition, so a hunt was arranged in a fashion that I had not seen before. Most of the guns crossed the river, and a spot was selected for the slaughter just where the stream broadened out into a small lake; at right angles to the river mounds of stone and moss were put up at a few yards' distance from each other, ornamented with coats, belts, and gun-covers, and behind the outside mound Capot Blanc took up his position. A steep hill ran parallel with the stream about two hundred yards away, and along this guns were posted at intervals, with the intention of heading the musk-ox towards the water. Noel and Marlo, supposed to be the two best runners, were to make a long round and start the band in our direction; I was stationed with three other guns among some broken rocks on the south side of the river, just opposite the barrier; and orders were given that no shot should be fired till the musk-ox took to the water.

It was a most interesting scene, and I would not willingly have changed places with any of the loyal Canadians who were at this time celebrating the anniversary of Dominion Day, with much rye whisky, a thousand miles to the southward. I had plenty of time to admire the surrounding landscape, and the sunset that lit up the snow-drifts on each side of the river; when suddenly over the opposite ridge appeared the horns of a band of caribou, and for a moment the leader was outlined against the sky as he paused to look at the strange preparations going on in the valley below. Behind me a ptarmigan, perched on a rock, crowed defiance; but there was no other sound, except the rush of water and the occasional grinding of an ice-pan dislodged from some small lake in the course of the stream. Fully an hour we sat among the rocks, and were beginning to think that the hunt had miscarried, when we heard a distant shouting far down the valley, and the next moment caught sight of a scurrying black mass crossing a spur of the hill close to the river's bank. The men posted along the ridge took up the cry as the musk-ox passed them, and joined in the chase; soon the animals came to the barrier, and pulled up short at the apparition, while, to increase their alarm, the hoary head of Capot Blanc arose from behind a mound of rocks right in front of them. This was the critical moment, and they would certainly have taken to the water and been at the mercy of their pursuers but for an untimely shot that caused them to break, and I was not sorry to see that several of the band escaped. I had had a splendid view till now, as the musk-ox halted within twenty yards of me, but we were forced to lie low when the shooting began, as bullets were rattling freely among the rocks in which we were hiding. We did no shooting on our side of the river, except to finish off a couple that took to the water; seven were killed in all, six cows, and a calf about a month old; there were no bulls in the band, and from what I afterwards saw they seemed to keep separate from the cows during the summer. A solitary old bull is often met with at this time of year.

When the hunt was over, I inquired the meaning of the shouting that had been kept up so continually throughout the drive, and was informed that this was necessary to let the musk-ox know which way to run. At starting they had shouted, "Oh, musk-ox, there is a barrier planted for you down there, where the river joins the little lake; when you reach it take to the water, there are men with guns on both sides, and so we shall kill you all"; when the men are out of breath, they shout to the musk-ox to stop, and, after they have rested, to go on again. These animals are said to understand every word of the Yellow Knife language, though it seems strange that they do not make use of the information they receive to avoid danger instead of obeying orders. The partial failure of the hunt was attributed to the fact that Moise had called across the river to me in French, and the musk-ox had not been able to understand this strange language.