The reindeer are killed by the Esquimaux in great abundance in the summer season, partly by driving them from islands or narrow necks of land into the sea, and then spearing them from their canoes; and partly by shooting them from behind heaps of stones raised for the purpose of watching them, and imitating their peculiar bellow or grunt.  Among the various artifices which they employ for this purpose, one of the most ingenious consists in two men walking directly from the deer they wish to kill, which almost always follows them.  As soon as they arrive at a large stone, one of the men hides behind it with his bow, while the other continuing to walk on, soon leads the deer within range of his companion’s arrows.  They are also very careful to keep to leeward of the deer, and will scarcely go out after them at all when the weather is calm.  For several weeks in the course of the summer, some of these people almost entirely give up their fishery on the coast, retiring to the banks of lakes several miles in the interior, which they represent as large and deep, and abounding with salmon, while the pasture near them affords good feeding to numerous herds of deer.

The distance to which these people extend their inland migrations, and the extent of coast of which they possess a personal knowledge, are really very considerable.  A great number of them, who were born at Amitioke and Igloolik, had been to Noowook, or nearly as far south as Chesterfield Inlet, which is about the ne plus ultra of their united knowledge in a southerly direction.  Okotook and a few others of the Winter Island tribe had extended their peregrinations a considerable distance to the northward, over the large insular piece of land to which we have applied the name of Cockburn Island; which they described as high land, and the resort of numerous reindeer.  By the information afterward obtained when nearer the spot, we had reason to suppose this land must reach beyond the seventy-second degree of latitude in a northerly direction; so that these people possess a personal knowledge of the Continent of America and its adjacent islands, from that parallel to Chesterfield Inlet in 63-3/4 deg., being a distance of more than five hundred miles reckoned in a direct line, besides the numerous turnings and windings of the coast along which they are accustomed to travel.  Ewerat and some others had been a considerable distance up the Wager River; but no record had been preserved among them of Captain Middleton’s visit to that inlet about the middle of the last century.

Of the Indians they know enough by tradition to hold them in considerable dread, on account of their cruel and ferocious manners.  When, on one occasion, we related the circumstances of the inhuman massacre described by Hearne, they crowded round us in the hut, listening with mute and almost breathless attention; and the mothers drew their children closer to them, as if to guard them from the dreadful catastrophe.