WONDERS OF ANTARCTIC WORLD 349 



lenge for a race in dressing and going out after the morning meal of fish, which 

 is cached in the ice outside. The challenge is accepted. The women dress and 

 rush out laughing, break off great armfuls of the frozen provender and come 

 back laughing to their still sleeping companions. The fish are thrown on the 

 floor until they have thawed from hard as stone to a mere frozen condition. 

 Then the two women who are dressed pass the food around to the others, and 

 soon the whole houseful are gnawing away at their fish breakfast. 



It doesn't sound appetizing, but even the explorers who have wintered on 

 this food declare that there are worse things to eat in the morning than a frozen 

 fish — after you get used to it. 



"The eating is not the trouble," says the returned adventurers, "it is the 

 getting of it that gives the Eskimo a problem." 



"The getting of it," the procuring of food in the waste of snow and frozen 

 waters, is more of a battle for the native than the problem of housing himself 

 against the wintry blasts. Hunting is his one means of living, whether it be 

 hunting reindeer, ptarmigan, seal, or fish. As a consequence the hunter is the 

 "great man" in the economy of Eskimo life, and the importance of a man is 

 reckoned by his ability to kill seals. The best hunter in a village is the king. 

 He has his pick of the women, and he exercises it with a freedom rather start- 

 ling to conventional ideas of matrimony. 



"Without hunters a tribe cannot exist," is the Eskimo's point of view, and 

 the tribes that have perished are the ones in which there were no strong, able 

 men to kill game for food. 



Armed with the most primitive of weapons, a piece of sharpened stone fitted 

 in a stick of wood to make a lance, the Eskimo hunts and slays the animals ot 

 his country, from the swift flying ptarmigan to the ferocious polar bear. The 

 sea is where he must look for most of his subsistence, for the sea holds the seal, 

 and without the seal the Eskimo could not live. The seal furnishes him food 

 and clothing ; its fat provides the oil which lights his lamps and cooks his food, 

 and its bones and skins make the boat in which the tireless native paddles over 

 the stormy seas in search of his prey. 



The Eskimo boat, the "kaiak," is his greatest invention, and the only small 

 paddle boat so constructed that it can live in the roughest sea. It is shaped 

 like a canoe, pointed at both ends, its decks covered with the exception of the 

 hole in which the hunter sits, which is large enough only to admit his body. 

 With his paddle in his hands, his harpoon slung across his shoulders, and the 

 prayers of his women following him, the hunter sets forth in the teeth of a 

 gale to slay a seal that has been sighted a mile off shore. 



