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A few days later the party encountered Amerindians of the Slave and Dog-rib tribes, who were so aloof from even "Indian" civilization that they did not know the use of tobacco, and were still in the Stone Age as regards their weapons and implements.
That night they encamped, amid heavy squalls of wind and rain, at the foot of a rocky hill, on the top of which their new guide said that it blew a gale every day of the year! Here the Dog-rib became very unhappy, and pretended to be ill, but a strict watch was kept on him so that he could not escape.
It is of the inner bark of willows, twisted in this manner, that the Dog-rib Indians make their fishing nets, and they are much preferable to those made by the Northern Indians.
The Copper Indians find by experience that a white dress attracts them most readily and they often succeed in bringing them within shot by kneeling and vibrating the gun from side to side in imitation of the motion of a deer's horns when he is in the act of rubbing his head against a stone. The Dog-Rib Indians have a mode of killing these animals which though simple is very successful.
Akaitcho caused himself to be paddled by his slave, a young man of the Dog-Rib nation whom he had taken by force from his friends; when he thought himself however out of reach of our observation he laid aside a good deal of his state and assisted in the labour; and after a few days' further acquaintance with us he did not hesitate to paddle in our presence or even carry his canoe on the portages.
The Dog-rib and his family of five had been hunting Barren Ground Caribou, and after killing, skinning, and cutting up a number of deer, had built a stage upon which they placed the venison. Moving on and encountering another herd of caribou, they killed again, and cutting up the game, stored it this time in a log cache.
It has been erected for the convenience of the Copper and Dog-Rib Indians who generally bring such a quantity of reindeer meat that the residents are enabled, out of their superabundance, to send annually some provision to the fort at Moose-Deer Island. They also occasionally procure moose and buffalo meat, but these animals are not numerous on this side of the lake. Few furs are collected.
Wentzel says that the Dog-rib Indians go in pairs to kill rein-deer, the foremost carrying in one hand the horns and part of the skin of a head of the deer, and in the other, a small bundle of twigs, against which he, from time to time, rubs the horns, as the deers do.
One Sunday afternoon a certain noted bishop of the English Church in Canada, who had spent most of his life as a missionary in the far Northwest, was discoursing at considerable length to a band of Dog-rib Indians camped at the mouth of Hay River on Great Slave Lake.
The weather becoming fine in the afternoon we continued our journey, passed the Dog-Rib Rock, and encamped among a clump of pines of considerable growth about a mile farther on.
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