AND KAYAK 191 



spite of the excitement, &quot; jigging,&quot; as it is 

 called among the fishermen, is horribly cold 

 work on dull, bleak days, and I was not 

 surprised to find the Eskimos wearing gloves 

 of seal leather on their plump hands to prevent 

 the line from chafing them. In ordinary times 

 the men and boys do the fishing, and leave 

 the women and girls to attend to the splitting 

 and salting, but when they light upon one of 

 the vast shoals of fish that seem to swarm 

 from place to place, the whole family goes out 

 in the boat, and the baby in the mother s 

 hood is the only one that seems too small to 

 ply the jigger, and tiny children somehow 

 manage, with much struggle and determina 

 tion, to land fish almost as big as themselves. 



After the end of the summer comes the time 

 for building houses. The fish is all dried and 

 bundled for market ; the seal hunt has not 

 yet begun, and the men have time to mend 

 their homes or to build themselves new ones. 

 Timber for houses can be had for the fetching, 

 though the woods may be twenty miles away, 

 and though the men of the northernmost 

 villages have no woods at all, but need to rely 

 on those living nearer the trees to cut planks 

 for them. 



And this is the way that the Eskimo sets 

 about his work, when once he has made up 



