Again the
old man was wholly astray in his Caribou forecast.
That night there was a sharp frost; the first we had had. It
made nearly half an inch of ice in all kettles. Why is ice always
thickest on the kettles? No doubt because they hold a small body
of very still water surrounded by highly conductive metal.
Billy went "to market" yesterday, killing a nice, fat little Caribou.
This morning on returning to bring in the rest of the meat we found
that a Wolverine had been there and lugged the most of it away.
The tracks show that it was an old one accompanied by one or maybe
two young ones. We followed them some distance but lost all trace
in a long range of rocks.
The Wolverine is one of the typical animals of the far North. It
has an unenviable reputation for being the greatest plague that
the hunter knows. Its habit of following to destroy all traps for
the sake of the bait is the prime cause of man's hatred, and its
cleverness in eluding his efforts at retaliation give it still more
importance.
It is, above all, the dreaded enemy of a cache, and as already
seen, we took the extra precaution of putting our caches up trees
that were protected by a necklace of fishhooks.
