124 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

with a comfortable subsistence, but of the skins she made a suit of neat and
warm clothing for the winter. It is scarcely possible to conceive that a person
in her forlorn situation could be so composed as to be capable of contriving
or executing any thing that was not absolutely necessary to her existence;
but there were sufficient proofs that she had extended her care much farther,
as all her clothing, beside being calculated for real service, shewed great
taste, and exhibited no little variety of ornament. The materials, though rude,
were very curiously wrought, and so judiciously placed, as to make the whole
of her garb have a very pleasing, though rather romantic appearance.

“Her leisure hours from hunting had been employed in twisting the inner
tind or bark of willows into small lines, like net-twine, of which she had
some hundred fathoms by her; with this she intended to make a fishing-net
as soon as the spring advanced... ;

“Five or six inches of an iron hoop, made into a knife, and the shank
of an arrow-head of iron, which served her as an awl, were all the metals
this poor woman had with her when she eloped; and with these implements
she had made herself complete snow-shoes, and several other useful articles’?.

Now that we are fairly well initiated into the secrets of human ingenuity
within the hyperborean wastes of America, we may review the various sources
of subsistence in connection wherewith this same ingenuity displays itself.

Deer the Staple Food of the Northeastern Dénés.

And first as to the reindeer, or Barren Ground cariboo (Rangifer groen-
landicus). Independently of the multifarious uses to which its whole ana-
tomy is put, and considered solely as an article of food, it is undoubtedly to
the majority of the northern Dénés, east of the Rocky Mountains, what wheat
is to the European, rice to the Asiatic, cocoa-nut to the South Pacific islander,
seal to the Eskimo, salmon to the native of northwestern America, and what
buffalo was formerly to the Plains Indian. It furnishes him with his staple
food and the material of most of his household impedimenta. For that reason
it deserves more than a passing mention.

Its range is from 60°N. lat. to the Arctic Ocean, including the adjacent
islands in the latter, and from Hudson Bay to the Mackenzie River, though
only straggling numbers ever go west of Coppermine or Great Bear Lake.
Within this area lie the otherwise resourceless regions known as the Canadian
Barren Grounds, immense steppes which would certainly prove the death of
the white man rash enough to venture through them, but which a kind Pro-
vidence has converted into what might be called the larder of the Déné hunts-
man. There, moving masses of reindeer subsist on a species of lichen named
after them ZL. rangeriferinus, almost the only representative of the vegetable
kingdom which nature does not grudge that unfruitful soil.

* “A Journey from Prince of Wales’ Fort”, pp. 262—64.