FEEDING THE SICK FOLKS 



I found plenty of mushrooms on the hillsides on 

 the warm days of August, but the Eskimos would 

 have none of them : in fact, they were hardly to be 

 persuaded to gather them. To their minds there is 

 something uncanny about mushrooms. " Aha," they 

 used to say, " the food of the Evil One piungitut 

 (bad)." 



But though gardening is entirely foreign to the 

 Eskimo nature, they do not entirely scorn the good 

 things of the earth. 



The berries are a great boon, so much that after 

 the failure of the berry crop in 1904 because a 

 plague of mice had eaten the young shoots in the 

 springtime there was an epidemic of ill -health 

 among the people. In most years the scrubby 

 bushes that crawl upon the ground are loaded with 

 succulent berries a truly marvellous provision and 

 the people gather them not only by handfuls and 

 bucketfuls, but by barrelfuls. In October, when 

 the ground was already becoming powdered with 

 snow and frost, and there was ice upon the pools 

 among the moss and on the stones that strew the 

 beach, I have seen the Eskimo women putting their 

 barrels on tall rocks, with heavy stones upon the lid, 

 or slinging them over branches of trees, and I have 

 asked them " Why ? " 



"Soon freeze," they answer, "high up not get 

 covered with snow good all the winter " ; and I 

 saw that there is a certain amount of provident 

 laying up for the future in the Eskimo life. 



I was glad to see it, for I had thought at first 

 that these hunters, who go out after the seals, and feast 

 high while there is plenty, would have no other idea 



than to live literally from hand to mouth. But I 



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