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Updated: May 25, 2025
Adam, our interpreter, being desirous of uniting himself with the Copper Indians, applied to me for his discharge which I granted, and gave him a bill on the Hudson's Bay Company for the amount of his wages. These arrangements being completed we prepared to cross the lake. Mr. Weeks provided Dr. Richardson and I with a cariole each and we set out at eleven A.M. on the 15th for Moose-Deer Island.
It now lay high and dry in what once had been mud, on the shore of a land-locked bay or pond, under the shadow of some towering pines. The spot looked like an inland lakelet, on the margin of which one might have expected to find a bear or a moose-deer, but certainly not a sloop.
A moose-deer crossed the river just before the party: this animal is plentiful in the vicinity. We encamped in a pleasant well-sheltered place, having travelled fourteen miles. A short distance on the following morning brought us to some Indian lodges which belonged to an old Chipewyan chief named the Sun and his family consisting of five hunters, their wives and children.
After you sent me back from the mouth of the Copper-Mine River and I had overtaken the Leader, Guides, and Hunters, on the fifth day, leaving the sea-coast, as well as our journey up the River, they always expressed the same desire of fulfilling their promises, although somewhat dissatisfied at being exposed to privation while on our return from a scarcity of animals for, as I have already stated in my first communication from Moose-Deer Island, we had been eleven days with no other food but tripe de roche.
The accounts I here received of our goods were of so unsatisfactory a nature that I determined to proceed, as soon as the lake was frozen, to Moose-Deer Island or if necessary to the Athabasca Lake, both to inform myself of the grounds of the unceremonious and negligent manner in which the Expedition had been treated and to obtain a sufficient supply of ammunition and other stores to enable it to leave its present situation and proceed for the attainment of its ultimate object.
This stream they call the Thlouee-tessy , and report it to be navigable for Indian canoes only. The forms of the south and western shores are better known from the survey of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, and in consequence of the canoes having to pass and repass along these borders annually, between Moose-Deer Island and Mackenzie's River.
Mr. Hood's journey to the Basquiau Hill Sojourns with an Indian Party His Journey to Chipewyan. March. Being desirous of obtaining a drawing of a moose-deer, and also of making some observation on the height of the Aurora, I set out on the 23d, to pass a few days at the Basquiau Hill. Two men accompanied me, with dogs and sledges, who were going to the hill for meat.
If any accident should have prevented the arrival of our stores and the establishments at Moose-Deer Island should be unable to supply the deficiency he was, if he found himself equal to the task, to proceed to Chipewyan.
The tall antlered horns, that rose upon the head of one of them, showed that they were deer of some kind; and the immense size of the creature that bore them, together with his ungainly form, his long legs, and ass-like ears, his huge head with its overhanging lip, his short neck with its standing mane, and, above all, the broad palmation of the horns themselves, left Basil without any doubt upon his mind that the animals before him were moose-deer the largest, and perhaps the most awkward, of all the deer kind.
In the winter, the deer tribe, especially the great American moose-deer, subsists much on the buds and young sprouts of trees; yet though from the destruction of the wolves or from some not easily explained cause, these latter animals have recently multiplied so rapidly in some parts of North America, that, not long since, four hundred of them are said to have been killed, in one season, on a territory in Maine not comprising more than one hundred and fifty square miles the wild browsing quadrupeds are rarely, if ever, numerous enough in regions uninhabited by man to produce any sensible effect on the condition of the forest.
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