LITTLE JOHN 



" open its eye " before he was ready ; and whilst I 

 was fixing the machine among the flour barrels and 

 dog's harness and half-thawed seals that littered my 

 end of the house, John, at his end, was urging Katli 

 and the children to greater speed in their hurried 

 tidyings-up and changing of garments. He flung off 

 his work-stained dicky and sat down in all the glory 

 of shirt sleeves, breathing hard in his excitement, 

 and called " Taimak ! " (ready) before Katli had fairly 

 fastened her blouse or tied the baby's cap-strings. 

 Poor Katli was flurried, and with good cause : it is 

 no small thing for an Eskimo woman to be asked to 

 leave her domestic duties and pose for her portrait at 

 a moment's notice, and as the average woman attends 

 to her domestic duties clad only in blanket trousers 

 and shirt, and the duties themselves are not so much 

 cooking and baking very little of either, as a matter 

 of fact but rather the scraping of oily sealskins and 

 the sewing of boots, it is no matter for wonder that 

 Katli had a brisk few minutes of sweeping skins and 

 boards and pots on one side, and piling discarded 

 work-a-day clothes behind the little boy, where she 

 hoped they would be out of sight. All the same, the 

 picture is fairly characteristic of a modern Eskimo 

 home. 



I could not help noticing the two clocks ticking 

 side by side upon the wall. I asked John, " Why do 

 you have two clocks that tell different times ? " Now 

 John's answer was a thoroughly Eskimo one, and 

 delivered with real Eskimo gravity and slowness of 

 utterance. " Last autumn," said John, " I did very 

 well at the seal hunt. I got sixty seals and seven, 

 and some of them were ugjuks (big seals). With so 



many seals I could pay all my debts and buy many 



68 



