WILD SPORT IN NEWFOUNDLAND.*
Is' it is the mark of a good travel hook to make the reader earnestly desire to go to the places described, then this is a highly successful work. The library of Newfoundland literature is not very large, and this is undoubtedly the most interest- ing modern contribution. Mr. Millais's vivid narrative, and a wealth of beautiful illustrations, convey a most attractive picture of the island and its sport ; indeed, we are far from certain, if we had had the good fortune to discover such happy hunting-grounds, that we should have been as unselfish as Mr. Millais in telling the news to the world. For this island, within seven days of England, is singularly unknown. Much of its interior has never been trodden by a white man, not even by the foot of the ubiquitous Government surveyor. "Out of a total area of 42,000 square miles," says Mr. Millais, "at least two-thirds of the country is still as little known as it was when John Cabot landed." Roughly speaking, the island is three hundred miles broad and long ; but its popula- tion of a quarter of a million dwells entirely on the coast, and five miles inland the unknown begins, save along the course of the new railway. Messrs. Murray and Howley have mapped and traversed the main waterways, but there our record stops. The reason is that horses cannot go into the interior owing to absence of grass, and the rivers need a skill in canoeing beyond the average Newfoundlander, who is first and foremost a seaman. In Mr. Millais's words, "though all at home at sea, be is all at sea at home." The book is a valuable study of Newfoundland life in almost all its phases. We hear of the old Arcadian days "when port wine was a shilling a bottle and the colony had no debt." There is a valuable account of the former Indian tribe, the Beothicks, and the present Indians, the Micmacs, and many delightful sketches of island life. But the main interest of the book is its sporting side, for Mr. Millais, though many other things also, is pre- eminently a spertsman and naturalist. It is the wild life of the coast and the interior that claims his main attention, or, to define by the animals pursued, the whale and the caribou.
There is something about seal-hunting on the floe ice, which is the hard.* way a man can earn his daily bread. The account, however, is second-band evidence, being recollections of the talk of one of the author's guides, Bob Saunders, who in his day had gone after " swoile." But Mr. Millais has been to the whaling himself, though apparently not in New- foundland waters, and be considers that the experience of being towed by a wild whale is the highest excitement that the world can offer. He gives us an excellent account of the natural history of the different kinds of whale, and of the modern methods of pursuing him. The personal risk is not so great as in the old days, but since big whales are now killed which were formerly impossible, strange adven- tures still happen. For example, in 1903 the steamer ' Puma ' spied and " struck " a large blue whale off the' Newfoundland coast about nine o'clock one morning. The whale went " wild " and started towing the vessel at six knots an hour. For twenty-eight hours the fight continued, and the end came thirty miles away from the start. In connexion with the coast- lands Mr. Millais gives us some charming pictures of the life of the people. Everybody is poor ; but he thinks that there is very little genuine distress. The hardest case is that of the cows, who have to live upon cod, whale-flesh, and sea- weed. In the spring the men go into the woods and cut logs for the lumber companies. In the summer they fish on the banks, while the women attend to the crofts. In August they come back and reap what crops they have, and then can go as guides to the interior. In November a man may hunt on his own account and kill three deer, which will give hint meat for the whole winter. He has never much money ; but he does not need it. His main grievances, says Mr. Millais, are the taxes, which are overpowering, and for which he gets nothing in return.
The interior of the island may well be described as a hunter's paradise; indeed, it is almost as fine a sanctuary as the first travellers in the Rockies and South Africa discovered. Many of the caribou have never seen man, and there am large tracts of country which man has never seen. In the
• Newfoundland and its Untroddos Ways. By J. 0. Millais, F.Z.S. With Illustratioas by the Author. London : Longtuans and Co. [21s. net.]
shooting season good weather can usually be counted on, and if the hunter goes late enough in the autumn he may escape the plague of flies, which in the summer are so bad that the natives will not venture up the rivers, and the unwary traveller may be driven out of the country. If he is a lover of the picturesque, he will find sunsets among these lakes and woods which he will never forget. As Mr. Millais says beautifully, "we are led by some invisible hand from the heat and turmoil of life to the beauties of space and the joys of distance, into the cool green places where no man comes." We have not space to follow the author into his natural history of the caribou. Suffice it to say that he will not admit the common distinction between the so-called woodland caribou of New- foundland and the barren-land caribou of Labrador. He maintains that all reindeer spend a certain part of the year in the timber and a certain part on the open ground. The number of deer in Newfoundland is immense, not less than two hundred thousand, and there is every hope that with proper precautions they will not decrease. The easiest time to shoot them is when they are migrating in the late autumn from the forests of the interior to the South Coast barrens. The construction of the railway gave the natives a chance of enormous battues, and led to the present game-laws. In the open or in the swamps the caribou is not a difficult quarry, but in the woods it is another matter :—
" Once in the timber, with the eddying winds, its intense still- ness, and its abundance of noisy debris, the caribou stag becomes a high-class beast of the chase, and almost as difficult to kill as
the wapiti or the red stag under similar circumstances The crack of a stick, the slightest movement, or the puff of the tainted atmosphere, and he is off full gallop without further inquiry."
Mr. Millais tried every form of hunting, but mainly what he calls river-hunting, when you have a glimpse of a stag from the stream, and have often hard runs to get into range, and long shots. We leave the reader to learn for himself the ups and downs of the chase. The author was amazingly successful, killing once in the dark a stag of forty-nine points, and many others scarcely leas fine and often at long ranges. As a fifty- pointer is the extreme limit of the hunter's ambition, this is an excellent record. He writes of the episodes of hunting with modesty, with great vividness, and with humour. His eyes are not so perpetually looking for deer trails that they cannot see other things, and there are many delightful episodes to relieve the sporting chronicle. Mr. Millais seems to have been exceptionally fortunate in his guides, both white men and Indians, and their talk which he reproduces is good reading.
Here is one such fragment :—
" Frank delivered himself one evening. 'We'd an English captain here once that tried to shoot deer on the best army prin- ciples, an' I couldn't get him cured nohow. He'd get a small hill betwixt him and the stag, and then make rushes in full view of any other deer that might be about. When he'd come to de ilex' mound he'd fall down flat like he had de stummich ache and peep round expectin' to see de stag, which by this time was travellin' up de country. Then he'd look round sour-like, and ses he, "Dese caribou about de wildest deer I ever struck and most difficult to hunt." But by-and-by he see army tactics warn't no use, so he got kind o' civilised, and used to say Newfunlan"nd make a fine training-ground for de British Army!"
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