tundra culture; pushed now far north since Europe mellowed into a
habitable world, but formerly widespread about the skirts of the
shrinking ice-sheet. Here we hunt large animals and sea-shore beasts,
and trap small-deer very ingeniously; we fish in the large
northward-flowing rivers; and eventually (heaven knows after how long,
or how far back from now) we borrowed a notion, probably from pastorals
imprudently straying too far along those northward river-lanes through
the forests, and domesticated our best of beasts, the reindeer; stealing
a march here on our Alaskan cousins, who call them caribou and treat
them so: _they_ had no pastorals on the prairie southward to teach them
otherwise, and when the Russians came and brought reindeer over from
Asia, the silly fellows turned them loose and hunted them till they had
eaten them all.

South of the tundra, the Great Northern Woodland encircles the planet,
interrupted only by the treeless sea. Here too we hunt, and trap, and
eat berries of the undergrowth, like Algonkins or Tacitean Germans, many
of whom had no more skill in cattle than Algonkins. But we have not the
place to ourselves, like the tundra folk and the Algonkins. Our forest
world is in ever-present danger of disintegration, and our wood-craft
with it. Fond folk with tame animals (poor sport, both of them, for
sportsmen like us) come blundering in off the parkland away south, up
the grassy glades, trampling undergrowth and scaring the game. People
are saved from all that 'over there', because no one can tame the
prairie buffalo and drive _him_ over the hunting grounds; some sport,
too, the prairie buffalo! And worse still, there are the people who come
hacking and burning our great trees, and tearing up the turf and
underwood, and all to plant their fancy grasses with the fat seeds, that
the deer like to browse over; and that is the only thing to make those
people show fight, if we or the deer go among their fat-grass plots.