urs of
teaching and the baptism of six children. I would have liked to have
stayed a day with them, but if we were to spend Palm Sunday at Fortymile
and Easter at Eagle as had been promised, the time remaining did no more
than serve; and there was a large band of Indians to visit at
Ketchumstock.

The next day took us into and across the Ketchumstock Flats, a wide
basin surrounded by hills and drained by the Mosquito Fork of the
Fortymile. The telegraph-line, supported on tripods against the summer
yielding of the marshy soil, cuts straight across country. This basin
and the hills around form one of the greatest caribou countries,
perhaps, in the world. All day we had passed fragments of the long
fences that were in use in times past by the Indians for driving the
animals into convenient places for slaughter.

The annual migration of the vast herd that roams the section of Alaska
between the Yukon and the Tanana Rivers swarms over this Flat and
through these hills, and we were told at the Ketchumstock telegraph
station by the signal-corps men that they estimated that upward of one
hundred thousand animals crossed the Mosquito Fork the previous October.

[Sidenote: CARIBOU]

The big game of Alaska is not yet seriously diminished, though there was
need for the legal protection that has of late years been given. It is
probable that more caribou and young moose are killed every year by
wolves than by hunters. Only in the neighbourhood of a considerable
settlement is there danger of reckless and wasteful slaughter, and some
attention is paid by game wardens to the markets of such places. The
mountain-sheep stands in greater danger of extermination than either
caribou or moose. Its meat, the most delicious mutton in the world, as
it has been pronounced by epicures, brings a higher price than other
wild meat, and it is easy to destroy a band completely. The sheep on the
mountains of the Alaskan range nearest to Fairbanks have, it is said,
been very greatly diminished, and that need not be wondered at when one
sees sled load after sled load, aggregating several tons of meat,
brought in at one shipment. The law protecting the sheep probably needs
tightening up.

The big game is a great resource to all the people of the country, white
and native. It is no small advantage to be able to take one's gun in the
fall and go out in the valleys and kill a moose that will suffice for
one man's meat almost the whole winter, or go int