FEEDING THE SICK FOLKS 



saw me. Presently she took them up again, and 

 fell to with the remark, uttered with a shy smile, 

 " Mammadlarput ukkoa (these taste very good)." 



Another had a lot of what looked like dried dates, 

 threaded on a string. This curious collection looked 

 very like a necklace, and she kept it by her bedside, 

 and picked one of the objects off to chew whenever 

 the fancy seized her. They puzzled me for a time, 

 until Juliana (who had made my skin clothes, and 

 had now become our first Eskimo nurse) enlightened 

 me. " These are trout-stomachs, dried in the open 

 air " a real Eskimo tit-bit. 



I might make a long list of the foods the people 

 brought seal meat raw, dried, boiled, fried, and even 

 made into a stew with flour and giving forth a most 

 appetising smell; the flesh of reindeer, foxes, bears, 

 hares, sea-birds of all sorts ; eggs of gulls, sea-pigeons 

 and ptarmigan, the gull's eggs especially being some- 

 times in a half-hatched state, with great, awful- 

 looking eyes inside them ; trout and cod and salmon ; 

 the boiled skin of the white whale and the walrus ; 

 raw reindeer lips and ears these are only some of 

 the peculiarly Eskimo dishes that passed before our 

 eyes; to say nothing of attempts at European 

 cookery, such as home-baked bread, sometimes grey 

 and sodden, sometimes light and wholesome, so that 

 we wondered how Eskimo hands and Eskimo stoves 

 could bake so well ; roasted dough, as hard as bricks, 

 a concoction of flour and water baked on the top of 

 a tiny iron stove ; and even, on festal occasions, dough 

 with currants. 



The list might be longer: as a matter of fact, 

 about the only food the people did not bring to 



hospital was their great delicacy rotten seal-flippers ! 



280 



