420 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



to spaciousness and never seem entirely at home in a house that is 

 larger than necessary. It is a part of their idea of proper house- 

 keeping that all possessions except those in actual use at a given 

 time are to be kept outdoors in some sort of depot, perhaps on a 

 platform or perhaps in a house built for the purpose. People go 

 out and fetch whatever is wanted and take it or the remains of 

 it out as soon as the occasion for use has passed. 



The beds in Hitkoak's large house were covered with polar 

 bear and reindeer skins mainly, but there were a few ovibos hides. 

 Some people had told me in 1911 that ovibos were extinct from 

 the part of Victoria Island inhabited by them, but I learned now 

 that a single herd had been discovered two or three years before 

 northeast of Prince Albert Sound and all the animals in it had 

 been killed. As these people cannot count above six, I was unable 

 to learn exactly how many animals there were, but I should judge 

 from the number of skins around this village and from the fact that 

 I was told that some of the skins were in the other division of 

 the tribe, that there must have been fifteen or twenty. 



The village had been standing here only a few days. Pre- 

 viously the people had been at some lakes a little distance to the 

 northeast, catching fish of various sorts with hooks through the 

 ice. One type was a salmon-like fish, red, and resembling the king 

 salmon of Alaska. The other was a fish which when we took a 

 specimen home to camp was said by Jones, who was an old salmon 

 fisherman, to be very similar to the steelhead salmon of British 

 Columbia. There was also a fish resembling closely, if not iden- 

 tical with, the lake trout of Great Bear Lake, with flesh slightly pink 

 but with a white skin. We saw specimens of these fish running up to 

 perhaps thirty pounds in weight. In Bear Lake similar fish attain 

 a weight of over forty pounds. 



Near these fishing lakes a few caribou had been killed. When 

 we arrived at the village they still had considerable stores of cari- 

 bou meat and fat with a little dried meat. Kullak and the Banks 

 Island party had been bringing home their sledges loaded with dried 

 goose meat from the moulting geese which they had killed north of 

 Kellett — white or snow geese. Seals were being caught through 

 holes in the ice by the mauttok method, and a few bears had been 

 secured. 



In the economy of these Eskimos the dog is used primarily for 

 hunting and only secondarily as a draft animal. The seal holes, 

 which are only an inch or so in diameter and through most of the 

 winter covered with snow, cannot be found by the Eskimos without 



