It is only within comparatively recent years that the problem of conserving the game resources of the Northwest Territories has become a matter requiring the serious attention of those responsible for the administration of the Territories. The slow development of a crisis arose from the lack of co-ordinated knowledge and from the assumption that a sparse human population scattered over an immense area would not necessarily lead to any serious depletion in the numbers of wild animals. Fortunately investigation was begun and a measure of control effected in time; otherwise the story of the plains buffalo might have been repeated in the barren-ground caribou, as it was to a large degree in the musk ox, which are now reduced on the mainland to a few small herds within or close to the Thelon Game Sanctuary.