Look there! Isn't that too bad!"
Looking up quickly to see what was the trouble I saw him gazing
regretfully at a salt shaker which he had just drawn from his
pocket.
"Just see," he exclaimed, "what I've been carrying round in my
pocket all the time you were running after those caribou, and never
thought about it at all. Well, I am sorry for that. I could just
have given you a bit and you would have been all right."
For fifty miles of our journey beyond this point we saw companies
of the caribou every day, and sometimes many times a day, though we
did not again see them in such numbers. The country was a network
of their trails, in the woodlands and bogs cut deep into the soft
soil, on the barren hillsides broad, dark bands converging to the
crossing place at the river.
At the time I made my journey the general movement of the caribou
was towards the east; but where they had come from or whither they
were going we could not tell. Piles of white hair which we found
later at a deserted camp on Cabot Lake where the Indians had
dressed the skins, and the band of white hair clinging to the west
bank of the George River, opposite our camp of August 15th, four
feet above the then water-level, pointed to an earlier occupation
of the country, while the deep cut trails and long piles of
whitened antlers, found at intervals along the upper George River,
all indicated that this country is favourite ground with them. Yet
whether they had been continuously in this territory since the
spring months or not I did not ascertain. The Indians whom we
found at Resolution Lake knew nothing of their presence so near
them.
Towards the end of August the following year Mr. Cabot, while on a
trip inland from Davis Inlet, on the east coast, found the caribou
in numbers along the Height of Land, and when he joined the Indians
there, though the great herd had passed, they had killed near a
thousand. It would therefore seem not improbable that at the time
I made my journey they were bending their steps in the direction of
the highlands between the Atlantic and the George.
The movements of the barren ground caribou of Labrador have never
been observed in the interior as they have been in the country west
of Hudson Bay. So far as I can learn I alone, save the Indians,
have witnessed the great migration there; but from such information
as I was able to gather later at the coast, their movements appear
to be as erratic as those of the caribou of northern Canada. [See
Warburton Pike's "Barren Grounds of Northern Canada".]
From Mr. John Ford, the Agent of the Hudson's Bay Company's Post at
the mouth of the George River, I learned that they cross in the
neighbourbood of the post at different times of the year.
