WHALE-CATCHING AT POINT BARROW. 833 



who intend to command whaling boats during the coming season 

 assemble, with all their gear, in the public room and hold a 

 solemn ceremony, with drumming and singing, to insure good 

 luck. Charms and amulets of many kinds are carried in the 

 boats. They believe that the whales are supernaturally sensitive. 

 If the women should sew while the boats are out, or the men 

 hammer on wood, the whales, they say, would leave the region in 

 disgust. . 



Let us see, now, how the boats are carried out over the path I 

 have described. The boat is firmly lashed on a flat sledge, to 

 which a team of dogs is attached, while the men and women hold 

 on to the sides of the boat, pushing and guiding. Hearing, one 

 day in May, 1882, that one of the Cape Smyth boats was starting 

 for the edge of the ice, two of us set out over the trail, and over- 

 took the party about two miles from the shore, where they were 

 resting, having sent the dogs ahead 'in charge of two women, with 

 another sledge loaded with all sorts of gear rifles, spears, and so 

 on. The party consisted of five men and two women. The cap- 

 tain of the boat and the harpooner wore on their heads fillets of 

 the light-colored skin of the mountain sheep, from which dangled 

 on each side a little image of a whale, rudely flaked from rock- 

 crystal or jasper. The captain's head-dress was fringed with the 

 incisor teeth of the mountain sheep, and the harpooner had an- 

 other stone whale on his breast. One of the women was deco- 

 rated with a stripe of black-lead diagonally across her face. In 

 the boat, for charms, were two wolves' skulls, the dried skin of a 

 raven, a seal's vertebra, and several bunches of eagle's feathers. 

 They say the skin of the golden eagle " the great bird " or a 

 bunch of hairs from the tip of the tail of a red fox, bring great 

 luck. In the boat were also five or six inflated seal-skins, which, 

 when we came up, they were using for seats on the ice. 



One of the women soon came back with the dogs, the seal-skin 

 floats were tossed into the boat, the dogs hitched up, and we 

 started ahead, the woman leading the dogs, and the men shoving 

 alongside. When we came up with the first sledge, the dogs were 

 unhitched from the boat and sent ahead with a load of gear for 

 another stage, and so on. On smooth ice the boat travels easily 

 and rapidly ; but where it is broken it is hard shoving and rough 

 scrambling for the men, while occasional stops have to be made 

 to chisel out projecting pieces of ice and widen narrow places in 

 the path. Then the dogs get tangled up from time to time, and 

 have to be kicked apart, so that their progress on the whole is 

 slow. When they reach the open water the boat is launched and 

 the gear put on board, and the sledges drawn up out of the way. 

 Everything is put in readiness for chasing the whales, and the 

 boats begin patrolling the open water. The harpoon, with the 

 vol. xxxviii. 58 



