370 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



by the shape of the horns and by the manner of carrying the head 

 even when still. But the best way is to tell by a combination of 

 these characters and especially the walking or running gait. An 

 Eskimo or other experienced hunter can tell the sex and age, and 

 by inference the size, of an animal as far as he can see it if it is 

 moving. But by mere apparent size no one can tell a big animal 

 from a small one when there is nothing by which to judge distance. 



August 7th, when we were thirty or forty miles northeast of the 

 home base, I saw with the glasses a row of sod monuments of the 

 kind used by Eskimos when driving caribou into an ambush. These 

 might, of course, be old ; but they looked very black and so we turned 

 out of our course to investigate. Much to our surprise we came in 

 sight of an inhabited Eskimo camp of the type so familiar to me 

 from Coronation Gulf — stones set on edge for the drying of meat, 

 and a small caribou skin tent with the hair side out. 



The family belonged to the Minto Inlet group. It was a man 

 named Kullak, with his wife Neriyok, their daughter Titalik of 

 about ten years (as we could tell by the fact that her face had just 

 been tattooed) and the boy Herona, perhaps six years old. They 

 told us that in the spring they had been encamped on the ice in 

 Prince of Wales Straits when Wilkins, Crawford and Natkusiak 

 passed that way, going towards Coronation Gulf. This gave wel- 

 come news that Wilkins had made good progress that far and the 

 reasonable assurance that he had reached our mainland base before 

 the breakup of the ice. Wilkins had given them information as to 

 the location of our Cape Kellett base, and three families had come 

 over to visit us for trading purposes and to spend the summer living 

 on moulting geese. 



They inquired eagerly whether we had seen any cattle and when 

 we said that Vv^e had not, either this year or the year before, they 

 gave it as their opinion that all of them had now moved away from 

 Banks Island. That is always the way with the Eskimos and the 

 northern Indians. They can never conceive of any animals being 

 exterminated, and when none are any longer found in any district 

 the explanation given is that they have moved away, usually be- 

 cause some taboo has been broken which has given great offense to 

 the animals and has induced them to abandon the locality. Kullak 

 said that three or four years before when he had been on south- 

 eastern Banks Island polar bear hunting, some cattle had come 

 down to the coast and had been killed, and he had heard of other 

 people killing them in that vicinity since. This spring, however, 



