310 



THE POINT BAKROW ESKIMO. 



IMPLEMENTS FOR PROCURING AND PREPARING FOOD. 



Blubber hooka (nl kslgu). For catching hold of pieces of blubber or&quot; 

 flesh when &quot;cutting in&quot; a whale or walrus, or dragging them round on 

 shore or on the ice, or in the blubber rooms, they use hooks made by 

 fastening a backward-pointing prong of ivory on 

 the end of a wooden handle, which is bent into 

 a crook at the other end. Those specially in 

 tended for use in the boats have handles 7 or 8 

 feet long, while those for shore use are only 2 or 

 3 feet long. These implements, which are com 

 mon all along the Alaskan coast, may 

 sometimes be used as boathooks, as ap 

 pears to be the case farther south, though 

 ] never saw them so employed. We 

 brought home two short hooks and one 

 long one, No. 50760 [120],Fig.311. This 

 has a prong of walrus ivory fastened to 

 a spruce pole, 7 feet 7| inches long, to 

 the other end of which is fastened a 

 short crook of antler. The pole is ellip 

 tical in section. The crook is a nearly 

 straight &quot;branch&quot; of an antler with a 

 transverse arm at the base made by cut 

 ting out a piece of the &quot;beam&quot; to fit 

 against the pole, and is held on by three 

 neat lashings of whalebone of the usual 

 pattern. The upper two of these are 

 transverse lashings passing through cor 

 responding holes in the pole and crook. 

 The lowest, which is at the tip of the 

 arm, is at right angles to these, passing 

 through wood and antler. The lashing 

 of whalebone close to the tip of the crook, 

 passing through a hole and round the 

 under side of the latter, is to keep the 

 S i jfbhib.hand from slipping off. The prong is 

 bi-rhm.ii. held on by two lashings of small seal 

 thong, each passing through a large transverse 

 hole in the prong and a corresponding one in 

 the pole. The upper pair of holes do not exactly 

 match. There are also two unused holes, one F, O . 8 i2.-Short-bandied blubber 

 in the pole below the upper hole and one above hook 



the upper hole in the prong. These holes and the new appearance of 

 the lashings indicate that the prong is part of another hook recently 

 fitted to this pole. The two lashings are made by a single piece of thong. 



