THE REINDEER HUNT 



On Easter Tuesday morning the sledges make 

 their start, and track westward up the frozen rivers 

 and through the winding valleys to the moss-covered 

 wilderness where the reindeer find their food. The 

 hunters have no luggage on their sledges : no tent, 

 no sleeping gear, only a scrap of dried seal meat or 

 fish for themselves and the dogs, and a gun, an axe, 

 a knife, a packet of sticking plaster for the inevitable 

 cuts, and a tin of grease for their sunburnt lips and 

 cheeks that is their whole equipment, with the 

 occasional addition of a kettle for the making of a 

 cup of Eskimo tea, weak as water, and flavoured 

 with a mouthful of molasses out of a bottle. 



They start together, but after a while they get 

 separated, and travel in ones and twos, or alone. 

 This man's dogs are slow, and lag behind ; the other 

 man wants to try such and such a valley instead of 

 the beaten trail ; and so they separate. 



When night comes they build snow huts for 

 shelter, and sleep on a bed of dogs' harness spread on 

 the hard snow floor not for any great comfort there 

 is in it, but because if they left it outside the dogs 

 would devour it in the night. In the morning each 

 man boils his own tea and munches his own solitary 

 feed of dried meat or ship's biscuits, harnesses his 

 team, and drives on alone. Alone he travels where 

 his fancy leads him : he will find the deer. Solitude 

 has no terrors for the Eskimo ; it wakens his best 

 instincts ; it matters not that he meets nobody, sees 

 nobody ; alone he finds his way to the hunt and back 

 again, trusting to his marvellous memory for land- 

 marks, and guided by the stars and the sunrise. 



It was a bleak, raw morning when I first saw the 

 reindeer hunters start : they had their skin clothes 



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