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We can then see what the attitude of a practiced hunter must necessarily be
towards a narrative such as that of Lorne Knight's diary.

The summer of 1910 we found ourselves in a position typical for
white, Indian or Eskimo hunters in a country where game is scarce. We were then
on the Coppermine River in artic Canada. Game was unusually scarce; all the
cows and younger caribou had left the country and there were only straggling
bulls, found singly or in pairs. I would frequently hunt from ten to fifteen twenty
hours before seeing the first caribou, and it might then take from one to several
hours to make the approach. When the animal was killed I would spend an hour or
two cutting the bones out of the meat to make it lighter, for I knew that any
meat left behind would be eaten within a few hours by wolves, wolverines, ravens
or gulls. I would then make up a back load of anything from seventy-five to a
hundred and twenty-five pounds and carry it home, sometimes as far as twenty
miles.

Such is bound to be the ordinary routine of a hunter who has no
accumulated provisions and finds himself in a section where game is scarce.
Critics who know this have said that the Wrangell Island party were in found an easy
situation as hunting goes but completely failed to meet it. The abundance of
fox and bear tracks and the gulls and ravens mentioned by Knight as flying
about everywhere showed that any meat left exposed away from camp would be
devoured presently. The critics point out that when a single hunter as a
matter of daily routine devotes ten to twenty-five hours to the securing of a
hundred-pound load of meat, it is absurdly simple for five sturdy people such as
the Wrangell Island party to go out two miles and bring home five back load aver-
aging one hundred pounds each. With the bones cut out this would be all the
meat of even a large bear; with the bones left in, the entire carcass could be
brought home in two such trips, each round trip not occupying more than three hours.

He who desires to take this attitue will find more material for