HOME LIFE 



his castle. And there they live in their little wooden 

 hut, until mere ambition or the number of the little 

 toddlers prompts the young father to tack a wing 

 on to his house, or to pull it down and build it again 

 on a larger scale. 



There is never a home without children. The 

 birth-rate is high, and most mothers have a family 

 of ten or twelve. 



If no children are born to a home, or if, as some- 

 times happens with the terribly high infant mortality 

 that prevails among the Eskimos, the little ones die 

 off as soon as they arrive, that home need not remain 

 childless. An Eskimo orphan never wants for foster- 

 parents. In so small a nation blood relationships 

 are close, and intermarriage has made "cousin" a 

 bewildering term. That means that an orphan 

 always has relatives of some sort willing to adopt it ; 

 and in the odd case of a child being stranded without 

 kin, as sometimes happens when people have come 

 to the stations from distant tribes, the hospitable 

 Eskimo nature comes into play, and some couple 

 comes forward with the offer of a home. 



Adoptions are very common. Sometimes families 

 simply exchange a child or two ; generally somebody 

 wanting a boy hands over a superfluous girl in 

 exchange ; but this does not always end satisfactorily. 

 It is all very well while the children are little, but 

 when they get into their teens the boy's father 

 sees a good useful lad working for foster-parents, 

 and he wants him back. The foster-parents very 

 naturally object : they have had the trouble and ex- 

 pense of rearing the boy, and are beginning to look 

 for some return. So the quarrel begins. Relatives 



on both sides are dragged in to palaver ; the head 



80 



