of the last century, the upper Peace River
and as far north as the Liard was stocked with them. As the Hudson's Bay
Company never traded in these skins for export, the Indians hunted them
for food only, Fort Chipewyan being regularly supplied by its fort
hunters with buffalo for its winter use up to the year 1885.

In sections of the wooded country of the north the bison in times past
were as plentiful as on the southern plains. During Sir John Franklin's
first journey, his people near where the Athabasca River enters the lake
"observed the traces of herds of buffalo where they had crossed the
river, the trees being trodden down and strewed as if by a whirlwind."
In 1871, two travellers making a portage to Hay River near its entrance
into Great Slave Lake saw countless numbers of buffalo skulls piled on
the ground two or three feet deep. The terrible loss of life indicated
by these bones they attributed to a fourteen-foot fall of snow which
occurred in the winter of 1820 and enveloped the travelling animals.

One cannot but be intensely interested in the preservation of this herd
of wood bison making here their last stand. The Canadian Government has
shown a splendid spirit in its attitude toward every phase of the
buffalo question, as its purchase of the Pablo herd from Montana now
ensconced in the new Buffalo Park near Wainwright, in Alberta, as well
as the measures for preserving these northern brands from the burning,
conclusively prove.

Upon my chatting with Chief Pierre Squirrel, and admiring largely his
magenta mosquito-veil, the astute chap tells me that he himself, back of
Fort Smith a few years ago, saw a full-grown buffalo pulled down and the
flesh literally torn off it by woodland wolves, strong brutes, he
assured me, which weighed from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
pounds each. A wolf shot on the Mackenzie last year measured from snout
to the root of the tail sixty-four inches. The Dominion bounty on the
timber-wolf is twenty dollars, but this is not an off-set to the
native's superstitious aversion to killing this animal; the Indian's
belief is that such slaughter on his part queers his hunt for a whole
season. He never goes out with malice aforethought on a wolf-hunt, but
if one of these animals crosses his track he may kill it, although
always with inward foreboding. A man brought in a wolf to Fort Smith
while we were there and throwing down his hunting gear said, "There, it
had better all be d