Caribou

Caribou are the Barren Lands’ most numerous large herbivores and the essential seasonal prey of the wolves Farley Mowat studies. Their migrations shape where the wolves can live and hunt, while the account of their relationship overturns an early assumption that wolves were chiefly responsible for the caribou’s decline. As both food source and ecological partner, Caribou become the measure against which the book tests inherited ideas about predation, abundance, and survival.

Range and Seasonal Movement

The caribou move across the narrative as a migrating population rather than a constant presence beside the observer. During spring, herds travel north from Manitoba’s forested areas toward the tundra near Dubawnt Lake. From his canoe, Mowat sees their many streams crossing muskegs and rolling hills as he approaches Wolf House Bay. By late June, the last migrating herds have passed the bay and are heading toward the high Barrens, roughly two or three hundred miles north, where they spend the summer.

Their departure changes the terms of life for the wolves at Wolf House Bay. The caribou are no longer available there, yet the adult wolves must support themselves and their pups. Mowat initially struggles to imagine an adequate alternative. His eventual observations and Ootek’s explanations show that the summer diet is more varied: mice can sustain wolves raising families beyond the caribou’s summer range, and Ootek also describes wolves taking ground squirrels and fish. These other foods qualify, rather than erase, the caribou’s importance: when winter closes over the plains, the wolves must follow the deer south.

In late October, the caribou leave the exposed tundra for the forests. From early November through April, they and the wolves travel through the taiga, the sparse belt of stunted spruce and jackpine below the treeline. Wolves may feed heavily on snowshoe rabbits when those are abundant, but remain close to the caribou because deer can sustain them in a time of famine. The caribou’s movements thus set a broad seasonal itinerary for wolf families and help explain why Mowat must leave Wolf House Bay as winter approaches.

From Apparent Slaughter to Human Hunting

Mowat’s first interpretation of the caribou remains near his cabin is dramatic and wrong. On a short exploratory circuit, he encounters four or five hundred skeletons carpeting the surrounding ground. Knowing from his research in Churchill that trappers did not shoot caribou, he assumes wolves must have killed them. If the density of remains were uniform across the country, he calculates, the evidence would imply an average of about twenty million caribou killed by wolves each year in Keewatin alone.

A second expedition deepens the puzzle rather than resolving it. A quarter-mile from the cabin, Mowat finds that the density of remains drops in an almost geometric ratio. The apparent concentration of wolf kills so close to human habitation makes little sense to him. Later, Mike supplies the missing cause: he killed caribou to feed himself and his fourteen dogs, requiring perhaps two or three deer a week, and also killed many across his trapping country. He used the carcasses to attract foxes to nearby traps. Mike preferred large, fat animals and estimated that he killed two or three hundred caribou a year, perhaps more. The bone field that Mowat had treated as evidence against wolves was, in large part, evidence of human hunting and trapping practices.

That correction matters because the supposed wolf-caused decline had political consequences. Caribou numbers had fallen catastrophically over the three or four decades preceding Mowat’s expedition, and reports collected by government agencies from hunters, trappers, and traders seemed to attribute the decrease primarily to wolves. The research assignment therefore carried an expectation that the wolf–caribou relationship would furnish grounds for a wider campaign against wolves. Mowat reports that his own early search had not produced the evidence his superiors appeared to expect. Mike’s disclosure instead reveals how readily a conspicuous accumulation of remains could be assigned to the wrong cause.

Hunting and the Wolf–Caribou Relationship

Ootek explains that a healthy adult caribou can outrun a wolf with ease; even a three-week-old fawn can outrun all but the swiftest wolves. Wolves know the limits of a chase and seldom waste their energy trying to bring down a healthy animal. When caribou are numerous, wolves rush a group briefly to test its members. If the disturbance exposes an animal in poor condition, they pursue it; if the deer run well, the wolves stop and try another group.

When caribou are scarce, wolves may coordinate more elaborate hunts. Some drive a small herd toward wolves waiting in ambush; others take turns pursuing deer in a relay, one driving the animals toward another positioned farther on. These methods reduce the caribou’s advantage but, in Ootek’s account, usually leave the least able animals most vulnerable. Mowat’s later observations broadly match this pattern: wolves trot through dispersed groups, make short approaches, and abandon deer that run strongly. Prime-condition bucks attract little testing; mixed herds containing fawns are of greater interest because young animals are more likely to include individuals not yet selected through prolonged survival.

The pattern complicates the popular picture of wolves as indiscriminate predators. Ootek describes them as taking the weak and small, and argues that this selection helps keep the caribou strong. His account is not merely an abstract claim: it is set alongside the animals’ speed, the wolves’ repeated testing of herds, and Mowat’s observations of hunts. The contrast between the caribou’s capacity to escape and the wolves’ willingness to abandon a chase makes restraint part of the relationship. A kill is difficult work, not an end in itself; after securing food, wolves rest and do not resume hunting until their supply is gone.

Mowat also records that wolves make use of a kill over time. They revisit it until the food is consumed; where scavengers threaten the supply, they may carry away and bury portions for later. Of sixty-seven wolf-killed caribou he examined after the wolves had finished feeding, the remains indicated extensive use of the carcasses, and many showed signs associated with disease or debility. This evidence supports the account of selective hunting while also showing that the conclusion rests on more than a single encounter: Mowat combines repeated field observations with examination of what remains after a hunt.

Knowledge, Evidence, and Significance

Ootek’s explanation reaches Mowat through an account of caribou as a gift that sustains people and wolves alike. In the story, the caribou multiply and provide food, clothing, and shelter; when the human hunters take the strong animals, the weak become too numerous, and the wolf is assigned the task of removing them. The story’s conclusion binds the two species together: the caribou feed the wolf, while the wolf helps keep the caribou strong. Mowat initially doubts that wolves would limit their hunting when they could supposedly choose any deer, but his observations of pursuit and abandonment lead him toward a more complex understanding.

The narrative’s evidence also distinguishes different ways of knowing the herd. Mowat’s early estimate extrapolates from remains found around one cabin and rests on the assumption that their density is uniform. Mike’s account identifies a human source for many of those remains. Ootek contributes knowledge of how wolves assess and pursue caribou, while Mowat’s repeated observations and examination of carcasses give him grounds to compare that account with field evidence. The correction is not simply a change in the estimated number of wolf kills; it is a change in what counts as an explanation for the visible evidence.

Caribou are therefore more than the wolves’ principal large prey. Their seasonal movement organizes the account’s calendar; their speed and herd behavior shape the wolves’ hunting methods; and their decline exposes the risk of treating human testimony or a local concentration of remains as proof of wolf destruction. By setting human hunting beside wolf predation, the narrative replaces a simple predator-and-victim story with a connected system in which movement, food, hunting pressure, and the condition of the herd all matter.