426 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



ful to explain again and again that they quite understood that we 

 were used to our food and that doubtless we liked it, but this was 

 because we were different not only in bringing up but possibly also 

 more fundamentally. 



I then tried to get as many families as possible to pay us a short 

 visit. This they said they could not do at present because there 

 was not enough snow for the building of snowhouses on the road, 

 and they considered it too great a hardship for women and chil- 

 dren to camp in tents at this season. They said, and my observa- 

 tion confirmed it, that the only place they knew of where there 

 was as yet enough snow for house-building was the campsite which 

 they occupied. The reason why they always camped here in the 

 early fall was that this was the first of all places north of Minto 

 Inlet for the accumulation of snowdrifts deep and hard enough 

 for house-building. The best I could do was to persuade two young 

 men, Nutaittok and Taptuna, to accompany us. We agreed to 

 carry for them any food which they wished to take along, and 

 assured them that we had plenty of seal meat and caribou meat 

 so they would not need to eat anything else during their visit, which 

 was expected to last only three or four days. 



We spent only one night in the village. The next morning we 

 purchased enough ethnological specimens to make a moderate load 

 and in the afternoon started north. Nutaittok and Taptuna had 

 at first thought they would take with them a considerable amount 

 of meat, but at the moment of starting they changed their minds and 

 left all behind except perhaps fifteen or twenty pounds. 



On the way north we spent a day or two at our hunting camp. 

 Our new friends found this visit attractive, for all our people de- 

 voted themselves to being as agreeable as possible. This was in the 

 main due both to their desire to be hospitable and to my insistence 

 that we must treat our guests as well as possible. But it was due 

 in part also to a fear felt by our Eskimos of the local Eskimos. 

 Nothing is more ingrained in the real Eskimo and nothing per- 

 vades more thoroughly his traditions and folklore than the idea 

 that strangers are necessarily hostile and treacherous. Every Es- 

 kimo group always believes that wicked Eskimos are to be found on 

 the other side of the mountains or down the coast at a distance. The 

 Mackenzie River and Baillie Island Eskimos especially had many 

 details of the bloodthirsty nature of the people to the east, although 

 the experience of every one who during the last few years had come 

 in contact with these people was that they were the most inoffensive 

 and kindly lot that you could imagine. 



