Keewatin Barrens is both a field of observation and a living ecological system in the book: an immense, open country where Caribou move with the seasons, wolves hunt within the limits of available prey, and human activity reaches far beyond the settlements. The setting’s apparent emptiness is misleading. Its animals and remaining inland people have histories and patterns of life that precede the narrator’s arrival, while hunting, commercial interests, and government policy increasingly alter the conditions under which they survive.

Landscape and Human Presence

The narrative presents the Barrens as tundra plains, broad expanses of muskeg, rivers, bays, and open lakes, with woodland marking a significant change in conditions. During a journey across the plains, the narrator describes the country as belonging to its animals rather than to its human visitors. He and Ootek are temporary intruders in a place that people have not dominated. The landscape’s scale is part of its meaning: the two travelers can move through it for weeks, making camps when they encounter new wolf families, without escaping the feeling that the country is not organized around them.

That distance from human settlement does not mean the region lacks human history. Ootek belonged to a group of about forty inland people, described as the last of their kind in the area and as nearly absorbed into the surrounding wilderness. The narrator contrasts their former life in the region with their near-disappearance. He also encounters signs of continuing human use: a family living in a skin tent, trappers provisioning dogs, and hunters travelling into the north country. The Barrens are therefore neither untouched wilderness nor simply a resource frontier. They are a place where older human presence, animal life, and newer commercial access overlap uneasily.

Seasonal Ecology

The movement of animals gives the region its changing structure. In summer, the narrator’s observations center on wolf families and their dens; when the travelers move across the tundra, Caribou and the birds that accompany them lend animation to the open country. In winter, wolf bands follow the movements of the Caribou. The account says that these bands do not appear to maintain fixed territories then: when unfamiliar groups meet, they may greet one another and separate. Their dispersal matters because concentrations of predators in one place could mean too many animals and too little food, though the mechanism that keeps the bands apart is not established.

The relationship between wolves and Caribou is explained through hunting behavior rather than a simple image of constant pursuit. Ootek tells the narrator that a healthy adult Caribou can outrun a wolf, and that even a very young fawn can outrun all but the swiftest. Wolves, he explains, test herds and pursue vulnerable animals rather than repeatedly spending energy on healthy, fast individuals. The narrator later watches hunts that accord with this account: wolves trot among dispersed groups, make short approaches, and abandon deer that run strongly. When food is scarce, wolves can work together, including by driving deer toward waiting hunters or relaying a chase from one wolf to another. After a kill, they do not resume hunting until the food is gone.

The seasons also bring sharp changes in survival. The account describes winter as a time of death for the wolves: entering the timber exposes them to intensive trapping and poisoning. Food shortages can compound that danger. In 1946, when lemmings were at the low point of their four-year cycle, most Caribou bypassed southern central Keewatin, where their herds had already been severely depleted. Hunger affected people, foxes, and wolves. Rabies, present among starving foxes, spread to wolves as well. The episode shows how an ecological crisis in the Barrens could emerge from several pressures at once, rather than from the actions of a single species.

Observation and Local Knowledge

The Barrens are also the setting in which the narrator’s scientific expectations are repeatedly tested by direct observation and by what local people tell him. At the wolf den, the country’s openness makes observation difficult: from a concealed position roughly four hundred yards away, he scans the sand with a powerful telescope but initially sees no sign of the animals. The long distances that give the landscape its sense of freedom also restrict what an observer can know. His conclusions depend on patient watching, identifiable individuals, and the correction of earlier assumptions.

Ootek’s knowledge changes how the narrator interprets what he sees. His account of Caribou selection and wolf hunting provides a framework for observations that the narrator had once been prepared to read as evidence of indiscriminate predation. Mike’s disclosures similarly revise the meaning of carcasses around the trapping country. He says that he kills roughly two or three hundred Caribou in a year to feed himself and fourteen dogs, and that he also kills them to bait fox traps. The narrator then considers the broader winter range of the Keewatin Caribou herd, where he knows of 1,800 trappers. Even after halving both that number and Mike’s reported annual kill, he calculates a possible total of 112,000 Caribou killed by trappers in a year. He recognizes that the estimate cannot be used straightforwardly in official reports, but the calculation makes visible the gap between private practice and the denials recorded in government polling.

Hunting, Policy, and Change

Human access to remote country expands the pressures on wildlife. The book connects light aircraft and snowmobiles with hunters’ increasing ability to penetrate previously difficult-to-reach Canadian regions. The resulting reduction in large game is then used by financially interested hunters, outfitters, guides, and lodge owners to blame wolves and demand their destruction. In the Keewatin region, trappers also regard wolves as competitors for Caribou and as a nuisance on traplines. Government bounties, ranging from ten to thirty dollars per wolf, reinforce that hostility and can function as an additional source of income when fur prices are low.

The account sets those claims against the methods used to kill animals. A trapper on the Manitoba–Keewatin boundary collected bounty on 118 wolves in one winter, 107 of them young. The book describes indiscriminate strychnine use over a wide area, which also killed foxes, wolverines, and other flesh-eaters. Caribou faced another form of organized pressure: a provincial tourist scheme brought trophy hunters north on costly, government-supported safaris. Aircraft could circle herds gathered on lake ice, drive them into a tight group, and allow hunters to fire from the planes while they taxied around the animals. The described practices make the Barrens not merely a remote backdrop but a place where access, profit, and policy change the balance of life.

That intervention continued after the narrator’s fieldwork. During the winter of 1958–1959, the Canadian Wildlife Service sent Predator Control officers across the Keewatin Barrens in ski-equipped aircraft to establish poison-bait stations. In early May 1959, an officer landed at Wolf House Bay, placed cyanide wolf getters near a den he found occupied, and spread strychnine-treated baits nearby. He could not return to inspect the station because spring thaws came early. The book closes its account of the region with this unresolved act of control: a specific den and its occupants exposed to poisoning, with no recorded check on the result.

Narrative Significance

The Barrens give the book’s argument a physical scale. The narrator’s close attention to animal behavior contests a public explanation of Caribou decline that assigns blame to wolves while obscuring the effects of trapping, commercial hunting, and government action. At the same time, the region is not presented as a stable idyll. Food cycles fail, disease spreads, and winter brings both natural scarcity and human persecution. The landscape’s significance lies in this conjunction: it supports complex relations that the narrator learns to observe, yet remains vulnerable to decisions made by people who may rarely see the consequences directly.