Human Predatory Pattern

In the hunting of animals the native can also call to his aid his skill in tracking. 

Like most savages, the Australian black is keen-sighted, and he makes use of his eyes when an enemy has to be followed or an animal hunted down. Many stories are told of the extraordinary powers of the trackers. Cunningham, an early writer, says that they will say correctly how long a time has passed since the track was made ; in the case of people known to them they will even recognise the footprint as we know a person's handwriting. A tracker has been known to say that the man, unknown to him, on whose track he was, was knock-kneed, and this turned out to be correct. On one occasion a white man had been murdered, and it was suspected that he had been thrown into a certain water-hole ; before it was dragged a native, who could have had no knowledge of the affair, was called in to pronounce on the signs ; decomposition of the body had already set in, it appears, and there were slight traces of this on the surface of the pool ; the native gave a sniff and pronounced that it was 'white man's fat,' and so it turned out to be.

 Grey tells a story of how he was galloping through the bush and lost his watch ; the scrub was thick and consequently the ground was unfavourable, but the watch was recovered in half an hour. 

But his powers of tracking are more important to him in the search for food. 

With the exception of the kangaroo and the opossum there are no quadrupeds which the Australian native employs largely in his cuisine. 

The kangaroo may be taken in wet weather with dogs ; but it is more often netted in the same way that emus are taken ; sometimes three nets form three sides of a square, and beaters drive the animal in. Somewhat similar is the method of firing the bush, which is also used for other animals ; in this case the flames take the place of the net, and in their advance drive the kangaroo towards the hunters. They may also be driven, men taking the place of the fire ; or, finally, the most sporting method, they may be stalked single-handed or even walked to a standstill ; but for the latter feat extraordinary physical powers are needed. For single-handed stalking great patience is needed ; sometimes the lubra (wife) helps by giving signals by whistling; at others the hunter will throw a spear right over the kangaroo, which believes that danger threatens it from the side on which his enemy is not ; then the hunter creeps up and spears it. Grey describes how the West Australian runs down a kangaroo ; starting on its recent tracks, he follows them till he comes in sight of it ; using no concealment, he boldly heads for it and it scours away, followed by the hunter. This is repeated again and again till nightfall, when the black lights a fire and sleeps on the track ; next day the chase recommences, till human pertinacity has overcome the endurance of the quadruped and it falls a victim to its pursuer. 

Before they prepare the kangaroo for cooking, the tail sinews are carefully drawn out and wrapped round the club for use in sewing cloaks, or as lashing for spears. Two methods of cooking the kangaroo were known in West Australia ; an oven might be made in the sand, and when it was well heated, the kangaroo placed in it, skin and all, and covered with ashes ; a slow fire was kept up, and when the baking was over, the kangaroo was laid on its back ; the abdomen was cut open as a preliminary and the intestines removed, leaving the gravy in the body, which was then cut up and eaten. The second method was to cut up the carcass and roast it, portion by portion. The blood was made into a sausage and eaten by the most important man present. 

In Queensland the preparations are more elaborate. After the removal of the tail sinews, the limbs are dislocated to allow of their being folded over ; then the tongue is drawn out, skewered over the incisors, which are used for spokeshaves, and would be damaged if exposed to direct heat ; the intestines are removed and replaced by heated stones, the limbs drawn to the side of the body and the whole tied up in bark ; then the bundle is put in the ashes and well covered over. 

In the Paroo district the kangaroo is steamed ; the oven is made of stones and wet grass, and the whole covered over with earth ; if the steam is not sufficient, holes are made and water is poured in. 

The wallaby is taken with nets or in cages placed along its path. When this little kangaroo makes for shelter, it runs with its head down and consequently does not see the trap. In some districts they are trapped in pits, primarily intended to break their legs. The most ingenious method was in use in South Australia : at the end of an instrument made of long, smooth pieces of wood was fixed a hawk skin, so arranged as to simulate the living bird. Armed with this the hunter set out, and when he saw a wallaby he shook the rod and uttered the cry of a hawk ; the wallaby took refuge in the nearest bush, and the hunter stealing up, secured it with his spear. 

The opossom may be hunted on moonlight nights or at any time with dogs, but the commonest method is to examine the tree trunks for recent claw marks. When these are found the native ascends the tree, cuts a hole at the spot where he believes the opossum to be, and drags the animal out. Another method is to smoke it out. 

Various ways of climbing trees are known, the most ordinary being perhaps that of cutting notches for the 1 feet ; then the native ascends, usually with the ball of the big toe of each foot nearest the tree ; but in South Australia he walked up sideways, putting the little toe of his left foot in the notch and raising himself by means of the pointed end of his stick stuck into the bark. In Queensland and New South Wales the rope sling is also found ; in some cases it fits round the man's waist and he uses his axe (PI. xx.) ; in other cases one end of the vine or bark rope is twisted round his right arm, then he tries to throw the other end round the trunk of the tree ; on the end is a knot, to prevent it from slipping from his hand ; and when he has caught it, he puts his right foot against the tree, leans back and begins to walk up, throwing the kaniin a little higher at each step. If the tree is very large, he carries his axe in his mouth and cuts notches for his big toe ; the kajiiin is taken off his right arm and wound round his right thigh when the hand is wanted for cutting notches. When not in use the kamin is not rolled up, as might be imagined ; it is simply dragged through the bush by its knotted end ; it is hard and smooth. This is really the most practical method. As a rule, men only ascend trees, but in some cases women and even women carrying children have been seen by explorers to do so. 

Other animals are of less importance. In the north of Australia the crocodile is taken with a noose, which a native will slip over his head, or by putting up screens in connection with a fence across a stream, in which an opening is left. The screen is made of split cane placed horizontally and all woven together with a very close mesh ; it can be rolled up like a blind. 

Rats are taken in traps or knocked over with sticks ; iguanas are speared in the open or dug from their burrows ; frogs are taken in the water in flood-time or dug out; and snakes are often found in iguana burrows. The wombat and bandicoot are dug out.

I had been compelled to come to Point Barrow for the lack of matches, but now that I was there I needed a great many other things, for the season was so short that I could not possibly get east to the Mackenzie River before the freeze -up. Instead of being able to winter in a region well supplied with fish and game, as I should have been had I obtained matches at Herschel Island, I was now compelled to winter on the northern coast of Alaska, where ten years before there had been vast herds of caribou , but where there now is practically no game at all. The let-alone policy of the Government, the cupidity of traders, and the ignorance of the Eskimo themselves have practically destroyed the caribou as the buffalo was destroyed in our own West. The situation here, however, was fundamentally different. In the West the destruction of the buffalo was a necessity, for he cumbered the land which the farmers needed for the planting of crops; but the caribou graze on lands where no crops will ever grow. Shooting buffalo for their hides and for sport destroyed them a few yearsbefore they would have had to go anyway; but the shooting of the caribou for the same reasons cannot be similarly extenuated, for had no more been killed than were needed for food and clothing for the population of the country itself, they would have lasted in definitely, and would have been forever an economic resource not only for the Eskimo but for the country at large. 

As there could be no hope of our party “living on the country ” the coming winter, I had to buy from the whaling vessels food enough to take us through twelve months. I had no money, for I expected to buy nothing in the Arctic, but fortunately, several of the whaling captains knew me and realized the circumstances; I had there fore no trouble in getting what I needed.

In going eastward, September 27th, we found the ice off the mouth of the Colville still too thin for safe travel, and we had to go along the shore, thus nearly doubling our traveling distance, for the land has many and deep bights. We were able to shoot a few seal, and to get a ptarmigan, gull, or a duck now and then. We were in no danger of shortage of food, for our load consisted of over two hundred pounds of provisions, besides the ammunition and camp gear. The ducks and gulls, we noticed, were all traveling west parallel to the coast. 

Just east of the Colville, at a point known to white men and Eskimo alike as Oliktok, but which on charts is called Beachy Point, we had luck in seeing a band of caribou. There were nine of them, and between Ilavinirk, Kunaluk, and me we got seven. This was the first time in my experience that I had shot at caribou with Eskimo, and it was probably the first time in the experience of these Eskimo that they had ever seen a caribou killed by a white man. Ilavinirk and Kunaluk, accordingly, had some amusing arguments about the matter later on. They had agreed that neither one of them would shoot at a big bull caribou until the others had been killed, because he was sure to be poor and his skin would be less valuable than that of the younger animals; nevertheless the bull was dead now , and Ilavinirk said that I had killed it; but Kunaluk said that could not be, and that one of them must have killed it by a stray shot, although admittedly neither of them had aimed at it. Ilavinirk and Kunaluk had never hunted caribou together before, and we learned later that Kunaluk considered he himself had killed most of these caribou, and that I had certainly killed none and it was doubtful whether Ilavinirk had killed any or not. But it was Eskimo custom and by it he was willing to abide — that when three men shoot at a band of caribou, the booty shall be divided equally among the three. This did not suit me particularly, however, as I had been feeding and taking care of Kunaluk for some time, and I pointed out to him that by white men's custom all the animals belonged to me. I told him, however, that I was willing to concede the point only in the matter of the skins and would keep all of the meat. 

We stopped a day to make a platform cache for the meat, and that day Kunaluk, unaided, killed another caribou, so that we had the meat of eight to leave behind in cache. Three of the animals were skinned as specimens, and are now, with many others, in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. These are the first skins of caribou taken for scientific purposes on the north coast of Alaska east of Point Barrow. 

On October 8th, just west of the mouth of the Kuparuk River, I went inland alone and killed a young bull caribou which even Kunaluk did not dispute had been shot by me. We had seen a band of caribou in another direction in the morning, and Ilavinirk and Kunaluk had gone after them, but with no success. In the afternoon, however, the three of us together killed another bull caribou, so that at the mouth of the Kuparuk also we were able to leave behind a cache of meat. These we expected to be useful some time later in the winter when we should come back over the same trail. 

The low, coastal plain of northern Alaska is triangular in shape, with its apex at Point Barrow, perhaps two hundred miles north from the base, which is formed by the east and west running Alaskan spur of the Rocky Mountains, which comes within a few miles of the coast in eastern Alaska at the international boundary and meets the ocean in western Alaska at Cape Lisburne. This plain is so nearly level that in most places it is not possible , in going inland , to determine offhand whether you are going up hill or down. The rivers are all sluggish, but thirty or forty miles inland most of them run between fairly high banks, which shows that the land does slope up , even though imperceptibly, towards the foothills. Just east of the Colville River at Oliktok, the mountains are probably about eighty miles inland. As you proceed eastward along the coast they be come visible from near the mouth of the Kuparuk. Continuing east ward they get steadily nearer the coast, and apparently higher, until their distance from the sea is not more than six or eight miles at Demarcation Point, while their highest places are probably about ten thousand feet in elevation and lie southward from Flaxman and Barter islands, where they contain a few small glaciers. 

This whole coastal plain was a few years ago an immense caribou pasture and inhabited by hundreds of Eskimo who lived mostly on the meat of the caribou. Of late years the country has been depopulated through the disappearance of the caribou. This fact explains the United States census returns as to the population of northern Alaska. To any one ignorant of the facts, the census figures seem to prove that the population of northern Alaska has remained stationary during the last two or three decades. This is so far from being true that I am certain the population is not over ten per cent now of what it was in 1880. The trouble arises from the fact that the census covered only the coastal strip. The village of Cape Smythe contained probably about four hundred inhabitants in 1880, and contains about that to -day. But only four persons are now living who are considered by the Eskimo themselves to belong to the Cape Smythe tribe, and only twenty or twenty-one others who are descended from the Cape Smythe tribe through one parent. The fact is that the excessive death rate of the last thirty years would have nearly wiped out the village but for the fact that the prosperity of the whaling industry there year by year brought in large numbers of immigrants; so that while thirty years ago it was safe to say that seventy five per cent of the four hundred Eskimo at Cape Smythe must have been of that tribe, no more than seven per cent can now be considered to belong to it . The difference is made up by the immigrants, who, according to their own system of nomenclature, belong to a dozen or more tribes, and hail from districts as far apart as St. Lawrence Island in Bering Sea, and the mouth of the Mackenzie River in Arctic Canada,while the majority come from inland and from the headwaters of the Colville, Noatak, and Kuvuk rivers. It seems that the inland Eskimo, who by their head-form and other physical characteristics show clearly their admixture of Alaskan Indian blood, are more hardy than the coast people, or at least are less susceptible to the half dozen or so particularly deadly diseases which the white men of recent years have introduced. But hereafter the census figures will begin to be more truthful, for now the northern interior of Alaska is all deserted , and no recruits can come down from the mountains to fill in the vacant places left by diseases among the coastal Eskimo. 

It was the vanishing of the caribou from the interior coastal plain that drove down the Eskimo to the coast, and now it seems that the caribou are having a slight chance, for in large districts where for merly they had to face the hunter, their only enemy is now the wolf. Temperamentally, the Eskimo expects to find everything next year as he found it last year; consequently the belief died hard that the foothills were inexhaustibly supplied with caribou. But when starvation had year after year taken off families by groups, the Eskimo finally realized that the caribou in large numbers were a thing of the past ; and they were so firmly impressed with the fact, that now they are assured that no caribou are in the interior, as they once thought they would be there forever. 

One result of this temperamental peculiarity was this, that during the winter of 1908-1909 there were numerous families huddled around Flaxman Island (where, as it turned out, the Rosie H. was wintering) with the idea that it was impossible for them to get caribou for food or for clothing, while we went inland to where every one said there was no game, and were able to live well. Our own small party that winter in northern Alaska killed more caribou than all the rest of the Eskimo of the country put together, because we had the faith to go and look for them where the Eskimo “knew” they no longer existed .

One day, in the heat of April, there appeared before my tent a naked woman and her crippled son. They had walked for a thousand miles, from Mingana Water, beyond the border of Western and South Australia, after having been abandoned in the desert by a mob of thirty wild cannibals. The woman’s husband was dead, and her name was Nabbari. She had a firestick, a wooden scoop for digging out animal burrows, and her digging-stick, pointed at one end. Her boy, Marburning, carried a broken spear to help him in his lameness, but Nabbari had carried him most of the way.

Following the tracks, as the mobs had turned hither and thither in their search of food and water, so Nabbari zigzagged with the boy, often forced to retrace her steps. Four seasons, each with its own special foods, had passed in her travels and never in all that time was her firestick allowed to go out; for it is forbidden to women to make fires.

Day after day small fires were lighted to cook snakes and rabbits and bandicoots, lizards and iguanas, and every living thing that provided a mouthful. They killed many dingoes, and even their pet puppies, but the little boy clung lovingly to the last one. When meat supplies faded, they lived upon edible grubs and honey, ants, and beetles, and wong-unu (a grass), the seeds of which Nabbari masticated before she cooked them when there was no water. In the arid areas she found moisture in the mallee-roots, and shook the heavy dew-drops into her weera from the small bushes and herbage so that she and her boy throve on the long journey.

Many times they came upon the scene of old fights, or the hidden places of the manhood ceremonies—of these they would make a wide detour—or an orphan water where, after she had drunk of it, Nabbari would set up her death-wail. But the live tracks of her relatives who had preceded her were always visible, and from them she gained courage to follo

Our chief diet in the past had been fish. We cast out our lines each day, and, as a rule, we were able to catch enough for both ourselves and the dogs. But with boiled fish for breakfast, fried fish for lunch, and boiled fish again for dinner, in the long run meal-time began to lose something of its glamour for us. We never used salt; potatoes belonged to a bygone day. In short, we experienced no pleasure, sitting down to that sooty kettle of ours. It was meat we were longing for. Of course, we could hunt, but that required leisure. So we got along with simply dreaming about meat. 

Then one day our dream became reality. We were paddling along a narrow stream which joined two lakes together. Wild ducks were splashing about in the water, and as I came paddling along behind Dale, I took a pot-shot at them. I brought down two, but to find them was not an easy task, for the reeds were so thick that the canoe could hardly move. I was pawing around in search of my game and had just found one mangled duck, when two shots echoed across the water. The only thing which occurred to me was that Dale, impatient over the delay, had fired his gun as a signal for me to hurry along. So I picked up my paddle and moved on. 

Reaching the lake, I caught sight of his canoe way off under the opposite bank. What under Heaven was he doing way over there? As I approached, my astonishment increased to see him splashing about in water up to his knees. Peevish because Dale's uncalled-for behavior had obliged me to abandon that other duck of mine, I halted some distance away and asked disagreeably just what he had meant by it. "Come on and help me skin this moose!" cried Dale. — It lay where he had shot it, in three feet of water. 

We began by devouring the heart. To be on the safe side, we took care of the tongue and kidneys in the same manner. After this we quartered the moose and loaded the meat into our already overladen canoe. In the bow we found a place for the head, with its mighty crown of antlers. The effect was decorative indeed. Then we paddled on till we found an attractive camp-site at the edge of a small river, and, with a sense of inner well-being, we spent the remainder of the evening puffing on our pipes and discussing the unbelievable good fortune which had suddenly come our way. But we didn't see Lion, Nagger, and Spike(the dogs) again until the following morning. At the place where the moose had been slain, they had stuffed themselves so full of meat that they had been unable to budge from the spot. 

It was not difficult for us to wait with patience the three days necessary to make dried meat of the carcass. Since leaving Slave Lake we had scarcely paused for breath, and all our clothes were badly in need of repairing before it would be too late. We cut the meat into large slices and hung it from a tripod, under which we kept a low smoky fire burning constantly. On striking camp we were able to crowd most of the smoked meat into four dog-packs, so greatly had it shrunk during the drying process.