Fred! Where’ve you been? It seems like it’s been ages! No time to chat, however – for this How, we’re off to the Labrador Peninsula of Quebec, in Canada.

Amazingly, the Labrador Peninsula looks just like the How2 studio. Funny, that.

Fred, however, isn’t impressed. Worse: he’s hungry.

Gail too. Ever the girl of action, she heads off to hunt a caribou deer.

Which sounds tasty… unless you’re a caribou deer.

Luckily for Gareth the caribou, Gail always looks in the same places. So as long as he’s not there, he’s safe. Gail and Fred may go hungry, but that’s not the caribou’s problem.

Fred, however, knows what the Inuit tribe used to do – they’d consult an old animal scapula.

They’d take an old shoulder blade – a bone from the last caribou they ate – and consult it for clues about where to go. The technique was simple:

They’d hold the bone over a fire…

…very shortly, the bone would crack. Now, we know that the cracks are random, and say more about the internal structure of the bone than anything else. But the Inuit interpreted the cracks as tracks, routes they should explore to find more deer.

The thing is – as a hunting technique, it works! You see, humans are creatures of habit, we tend to repeat the same set of actions day after day. The bone tracks would shake the Inuit out of their routine, causing them to look in new places – and that increased their chance of finding fresh prey!

By looking in new places and hunting over a wider area, the Inuit had a much greater chance of finding caribou. Look out Gareth!

Behind you!

Come here, you’re my dinner!

So, how lucky are you left-overs? For the Inuit, very lucky indeed. For the caribou… not so much.