The caribou supplies the Indian with nearly all the necessaries of life; it gives him food, clothing, house, and the equivalent of money to spend at the fort. He leaves the trading-post, after one of his yearly visits, with a supply of ammunition, tea, and tobacco, a blanket or two, and, if he has made a good season's hunt, is perhaps lucky enough to have taken one of the Company's duffel _capotes_ (about the best form of greatcoat that I have ever seen). He has a wife and family waiting for him somewhere on the shore of the big lake where fish are plentiful, expecting a gaudy dress, a shawl, or a string of beads from the fort, but relying entirely on the caribou for maintenance during the awful cold of the coming winter. The journey up till they fall in with the caribou is usually full of hardships, but once they have reached the hunting-ground and found game a great improvement in affairs takes place; the hunter is busy killing, while the women dry meat and make grease, dress the skins for moccasins, mittens, and gun-covers, and cut _babiche_, which takes the place of string for lacing snow-shoes and many other purposes. For the hair-coats, which everybody, men, women, and children, wear during the cold season, the best skins are those of the young animals killed in July or August, as the hair is short and does not fall off so readily as in coats made from the skin of a full-grown caribou; while the strong sinews lying along the backbone of an old bull make the very best thread for sewing. Anything that is left over after supplying the whole family finds a ready sale at the fort, where there is always a demand for dried meat, tongue-grease, dressed skins, and _babiche_, so that the Dog-Ribs and Yellow Knives, whose country produces little fur, with the exception of musk-ox robes, are thus enabled to afford some few of the white man's luxuries, tea and tobacco being especially dear to the Indian's heart.
A good hunter kills the caribou with discretion according to their condition at various seasons of the year. After the females leave the woods in the early spring he has of course only the males to fall back on, and these are usually poor till August, when the bones are full of marrow and the back-fat commences to grow. By the middle of September this back-fat, or _depouille_ as it is called in Northern patois, has reached a length of a foot or more forward from the tail, and, as it is sometimes a couple of inches thick and extends right across the back, it is a great prize for the lucky hunter. It is a point of etiquette that when two or more Indians are hunting in company, the _depouille_ and tongue belong to the man who did the killing, while the rest of the meat is shared in common.