For the hunters, as for hunting folk elsewhere, a crucial part of their yearly animal protein supply came from a week or so of intense round-the-clock efforts to take as much migrating prey as practicable. Depending on the setting, the migrating prey in question can comprise large mammals (caribou, gazelle), water fowl (ducks, geese), other migrating birds at their resting or roosting sites, or migrating fish (salmon, eels, alewives, herring, shad, smelt). In many cases the factor limiting the “protein harvest” was not the scarcity of prey but the scarcity of labor to process it before it
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