582 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



prepared to stay away from the home camp one or two days to 

 complete the skinning. 



The common Eskimo method of killing ovibos I have described. 

 It is to set a few dogs on the herd to hold them in a defensive 

 circle and then to stab the animals with spears. Latterly this 

 method has been modified where rifles have come in and shooting 

 now takes the place of the spearing, whereas in the old times the 

 bow and arrow were occasionally used. The northern Indians who, 

 to judge by my own experience and the accounts of Russell, Han- 

 bury, Pike, Whitney and others, seem to understand the ovibos 

 about as little as they do methods of living and traveling in the 

 country which the ovibos inhabit, used dogs also. It is possible 

 that their ill success in some of their hunts is due partly to some 

 difference in habits between the ovibos of the mainland and those 

 of the islands, 



I shot two ovibos as all we needed out of the fifteen or twenty 

 seen during the spring of 1915. When Storkerson first went to Mel- 

 ville Island early in the winter of 1916 he had with him Illun who 

 had killed ovibos on the mainland. Apart from him there was no 

 one in our various parties who had experience, except that Alingnak 

 had seen them as a boy and heard much about how they were killed. 



It was due to this inexperience that there developed among us in 

 Melville Island two distinct methods of killing ovibos. In Storker- 

 son's party dogs were sometimes used but the essential idea was 

 that the men formed a circle around the herd at fifty or a hundred 

 yards. Rarely a herd would stampede away from them and dis- 

 appear. They commenced shooting the biggest animals and went 

 on down to the calves, but with our powerful rifles the same bullet 

 frequently went through the body of more than one animal. How- 

 ever, their anatomy is so well concealed by the tremendous mass 

 of wool on the shoulders that most of the men did not soon learn 

 how to hit the hearts, and the brain or spinal cord proved a rather 

 small target. As a result, it commonly took five bullets or more 

 per animal to kill the entire herd. The wounds were almost any- 

 where in the body, and especially when the bullet had passed 

 through the intestines it was hard to make a clean job of the 

 butchering. 



This method was inferior to the one developed by Natkusiak's 

 party at Cape Grassy. Natkusiak told me that it occurred to him 

 one day to see how close he could get with safety, and that he got 

 so close that he could touch the heads of the animals with the end 

 of his rifle. If they charged, it would be one at a time and he 



