Evidently the beautiful thick coat of the woodland bisons allows them to laugh at the mosquito, for we come upon them in an almost impenetrable mosquito-infested muskeg.  An untoward frost is more to be feared by these great brutes than the attacks of any insect.  Thirty-eight years ago a heavy rainfall in the winter soaked the snow and formed a subsequent ice-crust which prevented them from grazing, and as they do not browse on the branches of trees, the herd was almost exterminated.  In the past, they have been abundant throughout sections of this North country.  In the beginning of the last century, the upper Peace River and as far north as the Liard was stocked with them.  As the Hudson’s Bay Company never traded in these skins for export, the Indians hunted them for food only, Fort Chipewyan being regularly supplied by its fort hunters with buffalo for its winter use up to the year 1885.

In sections of the wooded country of the north the bison in times past were as plentiful as on the southern plains.  During Sir John Franklin’s first journey, his people near where the Athabasca River enters the lake “observed the traces of herds of buffalo where they had crossed the river, the trees being trodden down and strewed as if by a whirlwind.”  In 1871, two travellers making a portage to Hay River near its entrance into Great Slave Lake saw countless numbers of buffalo skulls piled on the ground two or three feet deep.  The terrible loss of life indicated by these bones they attributed to a fourteen-foot fall of snow which occurred in the winter of 1820 and enveloped the travelling animals.

One cannot but be intensely interested in the preservation of this herd of wood bison making here their last stand.  The Canadian Government has shown a splendid spirit in its attitude toward every phase of the buffalo question, as its purchase of the Pablo herd from Montana now ensconced in the new Buffalo Park near Wainwright, in Alberta, as well as the measures for preserving these northern brands from the burning, conclusively prove.

Upon my chatting with Chief Pierre Squirrel, and admiring largely his magenta mosquito-veil, the astute chap tells me that he himself, back of Fort Smith a few years ago, saw a full-grown buffalo pulled down and the flesh literally torn off it by woodland wolves, strong brutes, he assured me, which weighed from one hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds each.  A wolf shot on the Mackenzie last year measured from snout to the root of the tail sixty-four inches.  The Dominion bounty on the timber-wolf is twenty dollars, but this is not an off-set to the native’s superstitious aversion to killing this animal; the Indian’s belief is that such slaughter on his part queers his hunt for a whole season.  He never goes out with malice aforethought on a wolf-hunt, but if one of these animals crosses his track he may kill it, although always with inward foreboding.  A man brought in a wolf to Fort Smith while we were there and throwing