the other day that the second
generation from this would have very little good to say of the
short-sightedness of these men who let such a valuable industry fail
to succeed.

With the increasing cares of the enlarging Mission, with Lieutenant
Lindsay gone back to Ireland, and no one to superintend the herding,
the successful handling of the deer imperceptibly declined. The tags
on the ears were no longer put in; the bells were not replaced in the
old localities. The herd was driven, not led as before--was paid for,
not loved. These differences at the time were marked by increasing
poaching on the herd by the people. Here and there at first they had
killed a deer unknown to us; and finally we caught one hidden in a
man's woodpile, and several offenders were sent to jail.

We appealed to the Newfoundland Government for protection, as to be
policeman and magistrate for the herd which one held in trust was an
anomalous position. I was ordered by them to sit on the bench when
these cases were up, as I did not own the deer. The section of land on
which we had the animals is a peninsula of approximately one hundred
and fifty square miles. It is cut off by a narrow, low neck about
eight miles long. During all our years of acquaintance with the coast
not a dozen caribou had been killed on it, for they do not cross the
neck to the northward. But when we applied for a national preserve,
that no deer at all might be killed on the peninsula, and so we might
run a big fence across the neck with a couple of herders' houses along
the line of it, a petition, signed by part of the "voters," went up to
St. John's, against such permission being granted us. The petition
stated that the deer destroyed the people's "gardens," that they were
a danger to the lives of the settlers, whose dogs went wild when they
crossed their path, and they claimed that the herd "led men into
temptation," because if there were no reindeer to tempt men to kill
them, there would be none killed. The deer thus were supposed to be
the cause of making cattle-thieves out of honest men! The result was
that a law was passed that no domestic reindeer might be shot north of
the line of the neck for which we had applied, and which we
intended to fence. This only made matters ten times worse, for if the
deer either strayed or else were driven across the line, the killing
of them was thus legalized.

[Illustration: A PART OF THE REINDEER HERD]

[Illustration: REIN