CHAPTER VII 



ODD CUSTOMS OF AN ODD PEOPLE 



HARD as is the life of the Eskimo, his end is 

 usually as rigorous. All his life he is engaged 

 in constant warfare with the inhospitable ele- 

 ments of his country, and Death, when it arrives, 

 usually comes in some violent form. Old age has few 

 terrors for the Eskimo, for he seldom lives to reach it. 

 He dies, as a rule, in harness, drowned by the capsiz- 

 ing of his skin canoe, caught by the overturning of an 

 iceberg, or crushed by a snow-slide or a rock-slide. It 

 is seldom that an Eskimo lives to be more than sixty 

 years of age. 



Strictly speaking, the Eskimos have no religion, in 

 the sense in which we use the word. But they believe 

 in the survival of the person after death, and they 

 believe in spirits — especially evil spirits. It may be 

 that their lack of any idea of a beneficent God, and 

 their intense consciousness of evil influences, result 

 from the terrible hardships of their lives. Having 

 no special blessings for which to be grateful to a kind 

 Creator, they have not evolved a conception of Him, 

 while the constantly recurring menaces of the dark, 

 the bitter cold, the savage wind and gnawing hunger, 

 have led them to people the air with invisible enemies. 

 The beneficent spirits are those of their ancestors 

 (another Oriental touch), while they have a whole legion 



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