taints their
flesh to a sickening degree. The insects on which they feed are mostly
of two kinds: one a sort of grasshopper with a hard black skin, and
the other a soft, brown, sluggish fly. "This last is the most
numerous. In some of the lakes such quantities are forced into the
bays when the wind blows hard, that they are pressed together in dead
multitudes and remain a great nuisance. I have several times, in my
inland voyages from York Fort (Hudson's Bay), found it scarcely
possible to land in some of those bays for the intolerable stench of
those insects, which in some places were lying in putrid masses to the
depth of two or three feet." It is more than probable that the bears
occasionally feed on these dead insects. After the middle of July,
when they take to a diet of berries, they are excellent eating, and
continue to be so to the end of the winter.

The Arctic foxes of this region when young are sooty black all over,
and gradually change to a light ash-grey in colour, with a dark,
almost blue, tint on the head, legs, and back. In winter they usually
become white all over, with or without a black tip to the tail; but it
is recorded by some travellers that not all the foxes of the _Canis
lagopus_ species turn white; some keep their dark-grey colour all the
year round. The common fox (_C. vulpes fulvus_) in Northern Canada is
sometimes black, with white-tipped hairs. Wolves in these far northern
regions do not seem to have been so abundant as farther south.

The deer tribe are represented (north of the Athabaska region) by the
reindeer and the elk (called by the Canadians "Moose"). The wapiti or
red deer (for which the common Amerindian name in the north was
_Waskesiu_) seldom ranged farther north than the vicinity of Lake
Winnipeg. The reindeer of the "barren ground" sub-species extended to
the Arctic seacoast, and were at one time especially abundant in
Labrador. Here they were so tame, down to a hundred years ago, that
fishermen were often known to shoot many of them from the windows of
their huts near the seashore. This type (_Rangifer tarandus arcticus_)
might possibly be domesticated; not so the larger and much wilder
Caribou woodland reindeer of the more southern and western parts of
the Dominion, which dislikes the neighbourhood of man. The elk or
moose, east of the Rocky Mountains, was not found northward of about
50 deg. to 55 deg.; but west of that range extended over all British
Columbia and Alaska,