66 FIFTY YEARS IN WESTERN CANADA

vermin and minor rodents could not climb. On this
the Carriers and Babines would thenceforth live as we
do on bread, having, for an occasional change, a few
potatoes grown in patches redeemed from the forest,
fresh fish from the lake or river, venison, berries, and
pine sap shaved off the tree trunk in thin ribbons, with
a special bone implement which always accompanied
women on the move.

We have mentioned venison. By this we mean the
flesh not only of caribou and moose, which could be
procured only at a distance from beaten tracks, on or
near the mountains, whereon the hunters roamed for
weeks at a time, but that of the black bear, whose pelt
was no less precious than the meat serviceable. In
several regions the coarse flesh of the grizzly, which
only an Indian can eat, that of the beaver, almost the
staple food on Fridays, that of the porcupine, the
gourmet’s part of which is the tail, that of the marmot,
good when fresh but which does not keep, and that of
the lynx, which the women abhorred out of a super-
stitious fear based on a legend in which Master Lynx
is made to play a réle repugnant to the fair sex, are the
chief food of the tribes.

Bears are plentiful in the north, so much so indeed
that Father Morice called his first book Au Pays de
Ours Noir, “In the Land of the Black Bear.’’!
Those animals were, in the course of his many jour-
neys, at times a source of danger, but more often the
object of a most welcome encounter.

Our friend was once descending the Fraser at the

Strange to say, those black bears, in Indian ses, are sometimes
brown, as a brown cub may occasionally be seen in the same litter as a
black one. Father Morice has seen cases of this. Yet the former must
not be confounded with the cinnamon bear, another species, much less
with the grizzly. Tothe natives, that brown bear is merely a black bear,
ses, which happens to be accidentally “red,” tel’ken.

ee et! Be