THE ESKIMO DOG 215 



needs the snows and the harsh climate of the polar 

 regions, away-from which it rapidly dies out. 



"In Lapland the reindeer is a domestic animal. 

 There it fills the place of our cattle and serves at 

 one and the same time as cow, sheep, and horse. 

 The Laplander lives on reindeer milk and its prod- 

 ucts, and on the animal's flesh. He clothes himself 

 with its warm fur, and makes a very soft leather out 

 of its skin. When the ground is covered with snow, 

 he harnesses the reindeer to his sled and travels as 

 many as thirty leagues a day, his swift equipage 

 with its broad runners gliding over the snow and 

 hardly leaving a trace behind. 



' i The reindeer is not rare in Greenland, but there 

 it lives in the wild state, for the Eskimo, much less 

 civilized than the Laplander, has not yet learned how 

 to win it to his uses and accustom it to domestic life. 

 It runs at large and merely furnishes the game on 

 which the Greenlanders count to vary somewhat 

 their diet of fish. For domestic animals, then, what 

 is there left to the Eskimo, since the only species 

 able to live in that land of snow huts, the reindeer, 

 is, in that desolate region, a wild animal approached 

 by the hunter only with ruse and caution? There 

 remains the dog, the faithful companion which, 

 thanks to its kind of food, can accompany man every- 

 where, even on his most daring expeditions toward 

 one or other of the poles. Where the reindeer would 

 have to pause, lichen failing or being covered with 

 too thick a layer of snow, the dog continues to go 

 forward, since for food it needs only a fishbone, and 



