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. der to procure skins for bedding
1
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THE NEW YORK LEDGER.
NOVEMBER 26, 1892.
VENUS, THE EVENING STAR.
BY MARY KYLE DALLAS,
The moon was in the heavens, Rose Adair,
Bright Venus, like a jewel, hung on high—
Veuus, the Evening Star.
And 38 yon looked your blue eyes caught the
‘gazed—rememb'rest thou, my heart,
rie Gtmplet cheek, that brow of purest snow,
Those red i ps lying just a thought apart,
r the Evening §
Love's star shone softly from the summer sky—
Love Ti ight burned brightly in those dusky
We wi alked together levers, you and I,
Al pe Odors dream we we too wise,
t the Evening Stat
I know not where you are tonite my Rose—
ng we’ve been parted in life’s busy crowd—
ort till these eyes in death's calm slumber close
yomompe! all the truth I y«
t that Evening Star.
HUNTING THE REINDEER.
BY LIEUT. FREDERICK SCHWATKA,
In the Esquimau’s struggle for existence
with a niggardly nature, the reindeer of
the north forms no immaterial part of the
supplies for his well-being. Could we
transfer the wool of our sheep,
from which we make our winter-
clothes, to our cattle, from which
we obtain our greatest supply of
meat, we mi ave an animal
equally as useful as the reindeer
is to the Esquimau, for to the!
it is both clothing and food.
My party reached the northern
shores of Hudson’s Bay early in
August, 1878, and at once found
itself among the Esquimau of
that country, who were eager to
offer their services for such com
pensation in the way of trading
material as the white mer of-
fered. 1 hired, directly and in-
and clothing and an ample sup-
of the meat, as the idea o
using the flesh of the walrus or
seal was very distasteful at first—
a distaste, I might add, that was
fore the natives, whom I liber-
ally supplied with arms and am-
munition, had been driven from
their inland hunting- -grounds by
the extreme cold of approaching
winter, in order to exchange
their sealskin tents for the more
comfortable houses of snow a
ice, fully five hundred reindeer
had been secured, and our minds
were relieved of all anxiety re-
garding meat, clothing and bedding for
the winter. Nearly as many more of the
animals were secured during the winter,
before our main sledge-journey was com-
nenced. n the following spring, five
hundred and twenty-two were added to the
already large score of about one thousand,
so my opportunities for studying the arctic
deer were certainly ample. There only
remains to be told the various adventures
and the experience gained in these en-
counters with them.
My first adventure with this game was
one stormy day in November, 1878, when
carrying about thirty-five or forty pounds
on my back up a little inlet of Hudson’s
Bay, which was frozen over, and the soft
snow which covered it about a foot in depth
made walking seem like the work of a
Hercules. The reindeer came out from a
low point of land about five hundred yard.
ahead of me, and neither my white com-
panion nor I would have seen him in the
blustering storm. A nearly full-grown
Esquimau boy with us detected him as soon
as his horns came from behind the distant
snow.
*¢Sh-sh-sh!” whispered the young na-
tive hunter, as the deer walked toward us
on the ice of the in! ‘ Manah timenah
weahk [Now same aS stones],” he added,
to show us that if we kept still the animal
would mistake us for a ridge of rocks, sev-
eral of which, protruding from the shallow
waters of the inlet, were in sight even at
that time, at least until the animal was
- near enough fora fair shot.
About twenty or thirty y: ards from us was
a low point of land, on the west side of the
inlet, ups which we had been ascending;
and a: e deer, for about half a minute,
would ‘be concealed by a small, low island
some two hundred yards distant, I sug-
gested that we should try to gain it, if
possible, as it was better adapted for con-
cealment when the deer reached us. The
island was very y low, and even as we crouched
down and ran we could see the tops of the
reindeer’s palmated horns above the ridge | w:
of the rocks that indicated the island’s po-
sition in the flat field of snow. We barely
made the point before he emerged, and, in
fact, we had gone a little too far, and were
retracing our steps a few paces to geta
better place from which to shoot. At that
moment we aroused about half a dozen ptar-
migans a few yards away, which, in the most
aggravating manner, went whirring, like so
many rockets, straight for the island; and
then, to add insult to injury, as soon as they
had lighted near the animal and glanced
at it, they went buzzing along again as if to
impress upon him that danger was near.
The reindeer stopped and with pricked-up | t
ears surveyed the scene, and, evidently im-
agining that every protruding stone was an
enemy, he started on the back track at a
swinging trot, a gait that was increased to
a run by one or two effectual shots at long
e, and he soon disappeared over the
rolling hills to the westwar
hese polar partridges, the ptarmigans,
are always most numerous during bluster.
ing, stormy weather, probably the winds
blowing the snow off ridges giving
them a better chance then to search for
more and more marked, until he will find
his hat knocked off his head, if he is wear-
ing one, unless he hurls a stone or strikes
at them.
This is exactly what happens when a
reindser is sighted. The hunter, dying i in
in the neighborhood of the animal’s
grazing grounds, f finds a couple of scissor
tails hovering ov His impression
is that they are defending their nest a quar-
ter of a mile away by their attacks and
screechings. About the time the game has
nearly reached fair gun-shot, these aérial
pests begin their assaults at close quarters,
for the hunter, hugging the ground closely | v
behind a small stone or a bunch of grass,
dares not move a muscle in opposition to
the birds, and these open, noisy assaults
often putting the wary deer on his guard,
he trots away, to the utter disgust of the
Esquimau, who now turns his attention to
the gulls, and generally kills one or two
with stones by way of revenge, before he
leaves the spot.
I was once pestered by one of these guar-
dians of the reindeer, while lying behind a
big boulder, Winchester rifle in hand,
awaiting one of these animals, which was
grazing towar ,» on King William’s
Land, When the reindeer got within about
three hundred yards me, he stopped,
either being warned by the bird or finding
2n unusually fine patch of moss, where he
kept grazing for about half an hour, until
‘(Ip WE KEPT STILL THE ANIMAL WOULD MISTAKE US FOR A RIDGE OF ROCKS.”
their daily food. The proverbial ‘‘ needle
in the hay-stack” would be easy to find
compared with these pure white prove
ouse crouched in a snow-drift during a
boisterous windy day, and when a traveller
has his foot almost on one, it springs out
from under him witha paralyzing sudden-
ness, as destructive to the nerves as if the
person had been about to step on a buzz-
saw. They nearly always wait until one
has passed them a short distance before
they take fright, and the first sudden im-
pression is that some wild beast has been
lying in wait and has suddenly made a
spring from therear. This was noticeable
on this particular day when we had passed
the ptarmigan only a few feet, and as we
were returning, crawling on our hands an
knees, they startled us and frightened the
larger game.
Of course, their t presence there was merely
accidental, an ned with losing the
reindeer would not ie more than once
in a hunter's life in the North.
Not so, however, with another bird that
the Esquimau believes deliberately protects
the reindeer in certain ways. This is the
little “scissor-tail” gull, or tern; of the
arctic, that is present in such large num-
bers over all the land near the seashores
uring the summer breeding season.
If a person is hunting anywhere near
these localities at this season, he is always
certain to be followed by one or two of these
birds flying in the air above his head and
making vicious plunges at him, which be-
come nearer and nearer as he approaches
their nest. If he approaches very close to
it, they will often strike him over the
with their vps screaming frantically. all
the time. I have frequently seen the Es-
quimau hvnters kill them with their guns
or with spears used as clubs when they
made these dashes. As soon.as a person
sits or lies down to rest, if he pays no at-
tention to them, their attentions become
a
my patience was exhausted, when I tried a
shot at that distance. His dark-gray body
was so nearly like the ground back of him
in color that, when I tried to take aim, he
faded out of sight like a dissolving view,
and it was not until he was ‘head on”
and his body brought into relief by his
white flanks that my game was down on
the ground, kicking most ferociously in the
air, and, picking up my hat, I walked to-
wart Vhen I was within thirty or
forty yards, he got up on his fore-feet, and
while | was reloading he jumped up and
started to run toward the sea, about a mile
distant. I then saw that I had shot him
just above the hind. foot, which dangled in
the air and delaye rogress consider-
ably, but did not prevent his rapidly in-
creasing the distance between us. Even
the August days of the arctic are not very
warm, and this was one in that month,
but to a person who has spent a polar win-
ter out-of- doors, travelling in the field, it
is sufficiently en running a foot-
race with a reindeer, at least, I thought so
when I got to the end of the course. This
brought me nearly to the end of a long
finger-like Point of low land, against which
a breez m the Arctic Sea was holding
the ice-; ‘pack 2 against the shore. The win
was not very strong, and the tide setting
out had prevented the ice-from packing
solidly against thé shore, but it was in dis-
jointed cakes, separated by lanes of water.
Across the forty or fifty yards of disjointed
pack the wounded reindeer scrambled, an:
reaching the outer edge of it, he had started
to swim across the bay, when I arrived on
the scene. A shot from my rifle through
his head put a stop to his Progress at once,
As he was too far beyond the ice to enable
me to reach him, and I did not know the
depth of the water where I would have to
enter in order to pursue him, I took the
surer incthod of wading out to him, and as
I did so through the Janes of salt water up
a
to my armpits, I am willing to acknowledge
that it was the coldest undertaking of my
ife. Iwas afterward stripped in a tem-
perature of sixty-eight degrees below zero,
during the short time it took me to remove
my clothes and get into a reindeer sleep-
ing-bag in a snow-house, where the lamp
not been lighted to warm up the
lace. It was tropical,
Peed with a bath in that salt ice-water.
A few months later, on this same g
William’s Land, the approaching cold
weather of the winter of 1879 had sent the
reindeer in numerous bands on their south-
ward migrations, until they came to the
narrow strait which separates this great
island from the mainland, The strait not
being frozen over, the number of deer
which congregated at the narrowest point
must have been well up into the thousands.
The arctic reindeer is an alrnost amphibi-
ous animal and takes to the water as if he
were web-footed, swimming across the
lakes in summer, when the ‘ice i i
they lie in his way, rather than go twice
the distance around them. When chased
on to points of land jutting into the sea,
the deer have been known to swim into the
water until lost to sight, and nothing was
afterward known of them, But it is some-
what different when they approach the
straits, migrating southward, for the weather
at zero is about c: nough to convert the
salt water into a sort of mush ice, about
the same as would be produce
by throwing two or three feet of
snow into the water, This would
retard the animal’s swimming,
so that it would fall an easy prey
to the many Netschilluk Esqui-
maux who congregate there to
slay the deer.
My party killed twenty-six
deerina day, Toolooah, my best
hunter, managing to
twelve of them.
a
a
most he could slay and properly
butcher, disposing of their meat
and allotting proper attention
.to the skins that were destine:
ing. During the last few days
of September and the early part
of October there were many
times when a thousand reindeer
could have been seen,- looking
from the top of the hil back of
our snow-house on the edge of
a large lake. One clear, cold
night in early October the straits
were frozen over sufficiently solid
to bear them, and within forty-
eight hours the vast multitudes
of deer that had been swarming
around us everywhere vanished
southward like a fog swept away
y a northern wind, and we saw
no more reindeer until Decem-
ber 12, two months later, when
we had reached Back’s Great
Fish River on our winter sledge journey to
Hudson’s Bay.
The incidents connected with meeting
these two reindeer are worth relating. We
had left the dangerous Rapids, on Back’s
River, which are open all the year. When
the temperature is under fifty degrees
below zero they throw out black clouds of
steam resembling the smoke from a Mis-
sissippi steamer as viewed from a distance.
We were travelling southward when we
spied the two reindeer on the western hills
bordering the river. They formed a most
welcome sight after our long absence from
them, and I was extremely anxious to se-
cure both of them.
out fresh meat a long time.
the ice-covered river and disappeared be-
hind a long island in front o} us, from
which it was impossible for them to escape
without our knowledge. oolooah ran
with all speed. To those who have trudged
wearily through snow until fagged out, ‘the
gait which these Esquimaux hunters main-
tain isa marvelous thing. Toolooah ran
to the lower end of the island and disap-
peared aroun In a few minutes we
heard a sharp rifle-shot ring out on the
clear, cold air, and expected and waited to
hear another to show that the second deer
had been secured. Ina short time Too-
looah was on the right ridge of the island
signaling to us to send him some of the
dogs from the sledge, which was unhitched
and sent to him. It was then ascertained
that he had killed both animals at one
shot. On the sledge journey of nearly a
year in length this had happened to him
about a dozen times.
Advantage is ‘taken of the reindeer’s
slight aversion, in fact, almost fondness
for, the water, by those natives near the
Arctic Sea, ho are not provided with
firearms. . Wherever: there is a large lake
ra wide river, they build little stone
monuments, looking as much like the
°
how ever, com- ~