THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 305 



less above the hole (and perhaps have been for hours, for this 

 hunting method, like most other primitive ways of getting game, 

 requires much patience). Your eye should not leave the indicator 

 where it stands upright like a peg in the snow. When the seal 

 rises to breathe you cannot hear him, you cannot see him, and 

 you have no warning till the indicator quivers or moves up. Then 

 you drive your harpoon down alongside the indicator. If you 

 hit the one or two-inch hole you hit the seal, for his nose is in 

 the hole. He is now harpooned and you hold him by the harpoon 

 line twisted around one leg while with an ice chisel you enlarge 

 the hole enough to drag him out. One man can do this easily with 

 a common seal {phoca hispida) weighing 150 or 200 pounds, but 

 with a bearded seal weighing 600 or 800 pounds it is no easy 

 job for two men. 



The reason why you may have to wait for hours and even days 

 for your seal to come up in the breathing hole is that he may have 

 a dozen other breathing holes scattered through several acres of 

 snow-covered ice, and he may be using one of the others tempo- 

 rarily. It is therefore best for several men to work together. 

 When one hole has been located and a hunter stationed there, other 

 hunters should take dogs in leash and lead them around in circles 

 until as many holes have been located as there are available 

 hunters. This greatly increases the chances of getting the seal 

 promptly. Any clumsiness of method at one hole will, further- 

 more, merely drive the seal to another hole watched by a better 

 hunter. 



No one should aim to live by hunting on the sea ice without 

 understanding this manner of sealing, called by the Eskimos the 

 "mauttok," or waiting method (in the Greenlandic dialects "mau- 

 pok") ; but in actual practice we have never had to resort to it. 

 We have merely had it as another string to our bow. Our seals 

 are secured either by the (among the Eskimos) nameless way 

 first described where a seal is shot in open water, or by the pro- 

 cedure about to be described, called by the Eskimos the "auktok" 

 or crawling method. 



Seals may at any season of year crawl up on the ice to lie 

 there and sleep, but they do it chiefly in the spring and summer — 

 from March when it still goes down to 30° or 40° Fahrenheit be- 

 low zero to midsummer when even on the ice the temperature is 

 40° or 50° above zero and much of the surface is covered with 

 pools of water. 



A seal does not crawl unguardedly at any time out on the ice 



