4]

teen or more, drive the band of deer or cariboo to where the snares are
set and, by loud shouting and firing of guns, they scare and thereby force
the reluctant game to pass through the noose which at once contracts
around their necks. The deer immediately scamper away with the mov-
able sticks, to which the snares are attached, and which, being soon caught
among fallen or standing trees or other obstacles, cause the caught animal
to stop suddenly with the result of being strangled to death in a short
time.’’!

The Sekani caught large numbers of groundhogs during the summer
months, most of them with snares. Mackenzie saw a “kind of wooden
trap, in which, as our guide informed me, the groundhog is taken ”;? but
the present day natives seem to have forgotten it. They did, however,
kill many of these animals with sticks, after smoking them out of their

Surface

Figure 3. Sketch of a fish-weir.
(a) Fence of brush across a streafa with gaps in the top.
(b) Horizontal piatform of small saskatoon branches, closely laced together just below the surface
of the water with the sharp points facing downstream.
(c) Sloping floor of poles, one end of which is above water.
(d) The slu ce-box in which the fish are trapped.

holes or flooding them out by diverting a stream; and if the groundhogs
retreated into crannies among the rocks they twisted long sticks in their
fur and pulled them out into the open. Beaver they generally caught,
and still catch, in nets of babiche, for they only used the spears described
a page or two earlier when they broke down the animals’ houses. Plate X
shows an ordinary beaver net; its dimensions are given by Morice:

“Both hands outstretched with the thumbs tip to tip are the standard
measure for the width of the beaver net. Large nets require twelve such
units, while the smaller ones have only nine or thereabouts. Such nets
never exceed twenty-five feet in length.’’?

1 Morice: Op. cit., p. 132.

2 Mackenzie: Op. cit., p. 217.

3 Morice: Op. cit., p. 159
2€665—4