MUEDOCH.] BONE CRUSHERS. 93 



they use for holding water, etc., and sometimes fit with bails of string 

 or wire, so as to iise them for cooking porridge, etc., over the lamp. 

 They had learned the value of these as early as Maguire s time, 1 as had 

 the people of Plover Bay in 1849. 2 



Hone crushers. In preparing food it is often desirable to break the 

 large bones of the meat, both to obtain the marrow and to facilitate the 

 trying out of the fat for making the peminican already described. Deer 

 bones are crushed into a sort of coarse bone-meal for feeding the dogs 

 when traveling. For this purpose heavy short-handled stone mauls are 

 used. These tools may have been formerly serviceable, as hammers for 

 driving treenails, etc., as the first specimen obtained was described as 

 &quot;savik-pidjfik-nunannsiin ktuij-kaii ti!&quot; (literally &quot;iron-not-dead-ham- 

 mer&quot;), or the hammer used by those now dead, who had no iron. For 

 this purpose, however, they are wholly superseded by iron hammers, 

 and are now only used for bone crushers. The collection contains a 

 large series of these implements, namely, 13 complete mauls and 13 

 unhafted heads. All are constructed on the same general plan, con 

 sisting of an oblong roughly cylindrical mass of stone, with flat ends, 

 mounted on the expanded end of a short haft, which is applied to the 

 middle of one side of the cylinder and is slightly curved, like the handle 

 of an adz. Such a haft is frequently made of the &quot;branch&quot; of a rein 

 deer antler, and the expanded end is made by cutting off a portion of 

 the &quot;beam&quot; where the branch joins it. A haft so made is naturally 

 elliptical and slightly curved at right angles to the longer diameter of 

 the ellipse, and is applied to the head so that the greatest thickness 

 and therefore the greatest strength comes in the line of the blow, as in 

 a civilized ax or hammer. The head and haft are held together by a 

 lashing of thong or three-ply braid of sinew, passing through a large 

 hole in the large end of the haft and round the head. This lashing is 

 put on wet and dries hard and tight. 3 It follows the same general plan 

 in all the specimens, though no two are exactly alike. The material of 

 the heads, with three exceptions (No. 56031 [222], gray porphyry; No. 

 89654 [906], black quartzite, and No. 89655 [1241], coarse-grained gray 

 syenite), is massivepectolite (see above, p. 60), generally of a pale .greenish 

 or bluish gray color and slightly translucent, sometimes dark and opaque. 

 No. 56635 [243] will serve as the type of these implements. 4 



The head is of light bluish gray pectolite, and is lashed with a three- 

 ply braid of reindeer sinew to a haft of some soft coniferous wood, prob 

 ably spruce, rather smoothly whittled out and soiled by handling. The 

 transverse ridge on the under side of the butt is to keep the hand from 

 slipping oft the grip. The whole is dirty and shows signs of consider 

 able age. 



1 Sec Further Papers, etc., p. 909. 

 * Hooper, Tenta, etc., p. 57. 



1 We saw this done on No. 500:14 [83], Hie head and haft of which were brought in separate and put 

 together hy an Eskimo at the station. 

 Figured iu Kay s Point Harrow Report, Ethnology, PI. II, Fig. 6. 



