THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 409 



tensely interested in all the information that I can continually get 

 from the natives. I have never acquired perfect command of an 

 Eskimo dialect, although I speak the Mackenzie River one about 

 as fluently as I do English, which is my native tongue. Fluency 

 does not necessarily mean idiomatic correctness, and when talking 

 with members of this group I am continually discovering mistakes 

 which it is well for me to correct. When there are Eskimos of 

 other dialects I make notes illustrating not only the idiomatic dif- 

 ferences but especially the sound changes. A simple illustration 

 is that the ending "yok" in the Mackenzie River dialect becomes 

 "rok" in several but not all the dialects of northern Alaska. 



A continual marvel to me is the endless variety of Eskimo 

 beliefs, called by us superstitions. With the most superstitious 

 persons of our own race we usually soon come to an end of the 

 list. They may have beliefs about the moon controlling the 

 weather, about the unluckiness of Friday and thirteen, about pick- 

 ing up a pin, about the lighting of three cigarettes with one match, 

 etc., but I have never known any one with whom the list of such 

 beliefs would not be ended inside of a score or two. With the 

 Eskimos there seems to be literally no end. Their range of infor- 

 mation about the facts of nature is limited and their information 

 about the non-facts correspondingly voluminous. 



Not as an exhaustive account of Eskimo beliefs but merely as 

 an illustration of what one may learn in a week's journey with 

 Eskimos whose confidence you have, I give a synopsis of diary en- 

 tries on this subject between October 2nd and October 15th. I was 

 happy that I was able to learn anything at all, for to me it is a 

 deplorable result of the Christianizing of the Eskimos that most 

 of those in the vicinity of the Mackenzie delta are now unwilling 

 to tell any ordinary person about the more interesting of their old 

 beliefs. They still hold these firmly but they hold them in secret, 

 talking about them in the Eskimo language when the white men 

 present are known not to understand what they are saying, and 

 with me, since I am known to understand, most of them are now 

 unwilling to talk at all. On this trip I was able to get the full 

 confidence of Illun although his wife objected strongly to his tell- 

 ing the more sacred beliefs, for they have divided them according 

 to the ideas of missionary approval and disapproval into two 

 classes — harmless and harmful. 



I shall give first some of the harmless ones. 



On October 2nd I learned from Illun, corroborated by Kutok, 

 that the reason sleeping people can see things at a distance is that 



