ween Fond du Lac and Fort Chipewyan a
few winters ago, was travelling without fire-arms and, as his trail
crossed that of the moving caribou, he had to delay his journey till
they deigned to give him the right of way. It was impossible to pass
through their ranks, and he hadn't even the satisfaction of making a fat
bull pay tribute to his Mother Hubbard cupboard.

Mr. Hislop, a fur-trader of Great Slave Lake, said to the writer, "At
Fort Rae the caribou are and always have been very plentiful, I don't
think they will ever die out." Rae was the old meat-station for the Far
North, and the records show that after supplying local needs three
thousand tongues were often exported in one season. If one intercepts a
caribou-band in a little lake he may with patience kill them all without
any trouble, as they run round and round on the ice, mystified by the
wood-echoes and the reverberation of the shots.

When the Chipewyan filters into southern latitudes and weakens with pink
teas the virility that should go with red blood, aping the elect he will
cast round for a suitable coat-of-arms. The proper caper for him would
be the caribou rampant with a whitefish flotsam. The whitefish
(_coregonus clupeiformis_) is gregarious, reaching shallow water to
spawn. Wherever you see Indian tepee-poles by the side of Northern
waters you may guess that to be a good fishing spot. The poles are
always hospitably left for the next comer, the Indian merely carrying
with him the skin or canvas cover of his tepee. The location of the
Hudson's Bay forts was in the beginning determined by the good
fishing-grounds, although now there is but indifferent fishing near some
of the posts. It would almost seem that the whitefish have in their
chilly veins as variable blood as any vagrant horde of caribou. The
whitefish contains all elements necessary for human nourishment, and it
is a happy fact that it does, for men and dogs in the North often live
for solid months on nothing else. It is a rich fat fish and the usual
mode of cooking it is by boiling. Northern people tell you that it is
the only fish whose taste will never produce satiety, as it becomes
daily more agreeable to the palate. I can't say that it worked on our
sensibilities in just that way. But it is the old story of _de
gustibus_, etc. We see the Fond du Lac people this evening roasting upon
the coals, as choice tit-bits, the stomachs of the whitefish. Scraping
the dirt and ashes from the blac