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And as he went, he pictured to himself the whole caribou herd, now half foundered in the drift, labouring toward the same retreat. Once more, crushing back hunger and faintness, he summoned up his spirit, and vowed that if the beasts could fight their way to cover, he could.
If we could reach Michikamau by September first that should give me ample time, I believed, to reach the George River before the caribou migration would take place. The following morning we started forward with a will, and with many little lakes to cross and short portages between them, we made fairly good progress, and each lake took us one step higher on the plateau.
"I told of the deer, the moose and the caribou, all of which I had killed, and of our fishing on the long river of the north with a lure made of the feathers of a woodpecker, and of covering the bottom of our canoe with beautiful speckled fish. All this warmed the heart of Sir Benjamin who questioned me as to every detail in my experience on trail and river.
Thus our blankets and clothing were safe, we had fifty pounds of pemmican, our tent and tent stove, and in the small bag that I have mentioned as having remained in the canoe with the other things was all our tea and five or six pounds of caribou tallow. Our matches and this was a great piece of good fortune were uninjured, and we had a good stock of them.
A vision came to him, unreal and dream-like, of that wonderful night under the stars ages and ages ago, it seemed when he had fought the leader of the wolf-pack, and young Gray Wolf had crept to his side after his victory and had given herself to him for mate. But this mating season there was no running after the doe or the caribou, or mingling with the wild pack.
But a man may also love it who regards all such visions as delusions. The game and the fish of Alaska, the natural subsistence of the Indian, are virtually undiminished. Vast herds of caribou still wander on the hills, and far more are killed every year by wolves than by men. Great numbers of moose still roam the lowlands.
This would not have excited him under ordinary conditions, and it would not have excited him now had the presence been that of a female bear. But the scent was that of a he-bear, and it drifted strongly up a rock-cut ravine that ran straight down toward the balsam patch in which he had hidden the caribou. Thor stopped to ask himself no questions.
His caribou horns had been gnawed by mice in his wigwam, but he thought that the horns neither of the moose nor of the caribou were ever gnawed while the creature was alive, as some have asserted.
But his heart suddenly leaped when Bill glanced back in warning and pointed to an entrancing wilderness picture, a hundred yards in front. In a little glade and framed by the forest stood a large bull caribou, flashing and incredibly vivid against the snow.
The moose frequents the prairie where the buffalo feeds, while the caribou generally inhabits low and swampy regions. The chief begged us to remain by the animal we had killed, while he returned to the lodges, that he might send the horses to bring home the meat, with two others for us to ride.
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