The black bear in northern Canada is said to give birth at times to cubs which are cinnamon-brown in colour.

“In the early summer the black bears swim up and down the northern rivers with their mouths open, swallowing the immense number of water insects which have come into being at that season.”  Hearne goes on to state that bears which have subsisted on this food for some days, when cut open emit a stench that is intolerable, and which taints their flesh to a sickening degree.  The insects on which they feed are mostly of two kinds:  one a sort of grasshopper with a hard black skin, and the other a soft, brown, sluggish fly.  “This last is the most numerous.  In some of the lakes such quantities are forced into the bays when the wind blows hard, that they are pressed together in dead multitudes and remain a great nuisance.  I have several times, in my inland voyages from York Fort (Hudson’s Bay), found it scarcely possible to land in some of those bays for the intolerable stench of those insects, which in some places were lying in putrid masses to the depth of two or three feet.”  It is more than probable that the bears occasionally feed on these dead insects.  After the middle of July, when they take to a diet of berries, they are excellent eating, and continue to be so to the end of the winter.

The Arctic foxes of this region when young are sooty black all over, and gradually change to a light ash-grey in colour, with a dark, almost blue, tint on the head, legs, and back.  In winter they usually become white all over, with or without a black tip to the tail; but it is recorded by some travellers that not all the foxes of the Canis lagopus species turn white; some keep their dark-grey colour all the year round.  The common fox (C. vulpes fulvus) in Northern Canada is sometimes black, with white-tipped hairs.  Wolves in these far northern regions do not seem to have been so abundant as farther south.

The deer tribe are represented (north of the Athabaska region) by the reindeer and the elk (called by the Canadians “Moose").  The wapiti or red deer (for which the common Amerindian name in the north was Waskesiu) seldom ranged farther north than the vicinity of Lake Winnipeg.  The reindeer of the “barren ground” sub-species extended to the Arctic seacoast, and were at one time especially abundant in Labrador.  Here they were so tame, down to a hundred years ago, that fishermen were often known to shoot many of them from the windows of their huts near the seashore.  This type (Rangifer tarandus arcticus) might possibly be domesticated; not so the larger and much wilder Caribou woodland reindeer of the more southern and western parts of the Dominion, which dislikes the neighbourhood of man.  The elk or moose, east of the Rocky Mountains, was not found northward of about 50 deg. to 55 deg.; but west of that range extended over all British Columbia and Alaska, in which latter country it grows to a giant size and develops enormous antlers.