302 THK POINT HARROW ESKIMO. 



skin, gathering and stretching the strip with the left hand. They do 

 this work quite rapidly and with great skill, cutting single lines upward 

 of !K) feet long and only one-eighth inch in diameter, almost perfectly 

 even. These fine lines of seal-skin thong, which serve a great variety of 

 purposes, are usually made when they are in the summer camps, before 

 the breaking up of the ice. They arc dried by stretching them between 

 stakes inches or a foot high, driven into the ground. 



The. stout thongs of the hide of the bearded seal, walrus, or beluga 

 are usually made in the winter and stretched to dry between posts of 

 whales bones set up in the village, about breast high. While they are 

 drying, the maker carefully trims and scrapes the edges with his knife, 

 so as to make an almost round line. 1 The, usual diameter is about 0-3 

 inch. These lines are not always made with such care, being often 

 merely flat thongs. Fine deer-skin twine, or &quot;babiche,&quot; as it is called 

 by the voyageurs, for making the nettings of snow shoes, is made in the 

 same way. A deer skin is dampened, rolled up, and put up over the lamp 

 for a day or two to remove the hair by sweating, and then cut into a 

 single long piece of flue thong. 



All the men do not appear able to do this fine 

 work. For instance, our friend Mu fiialu had the 

 babiche for his new snowshoes made by his house 

 mate, the younger Tunazu. When it is desired 

 to fasten together two pieces of the stouter kinds 

 of thong, what I have so often referred to as the 

 &quot;double-slit splice&quot; is generally employed. This 

 i 8 milde !ls follows: The two ends to be joined to- 

 for rawhide lines. getlier are each slit lengthwise, and one is passed 

 through the slit in the other. The other end of this piece is then passed 

 through the slit in the first piece, and drawn through so that the sides 

 of each slit interlace, like the loops of a square knot (see diagrams, Fig. 

 1502). The splice is often further secured by a seizing of sinew braid. 

 Most writers on the Eskimo have not gone sufficiently into the details of 

 their arts to describe their methods of splicing. One writer, 2 however, 

 in describing some Eskimo implements from East Greenland, describes 

 and figures several splices somewhat of this nature, and one in particu 

 lar especially complicated by crossing the sides of the slits and passing 

 the end through several times. This method of uniting thongs is prob 

 ably very general among the Eskimo and is also common enough among 

 civilized people. 



BUILDERS TOOLS. 



For excavating. At the present day they arc very glad to use white 

 men s picks and shovels when they want to dig in the gravel or clean 

 out the ice from their houses. They, however, have mattocks and pick 



1 Gilder describee a similar proeess of manufacturing these, lines at Hudson s Bay. (Sehwatka n 

 Scardi, p. 170.) 

 W. J. Sullaa, in Jour. Authrop. lust, of Croat Britain and Ireland, vol. 9, pp. :!29-33C. 



