422 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



reason why the introduction of firearms brings about such destruc- 

 tion of caribou is that the rifle makes it so easy to provide dogs 

 with food, and the mobility of the caribou herds makes it so desir- 

 able to have large teams to follow the herds about, that the situation 

 takes the form of an endless chain. A man has more dogs so he 

 can kill more caribou to feed more dogs to help him to kill more 

 caribou. The Eskimos around the Mackenzie River or Cape Bath- 

 urst who used to content themselves with two or three dogs to a 

 family before the introduction of firearms, had fifteen or twenty 

 dogs after rifles came and while the caribou were still plentiful. 

 Later, of course, when the caribou had been nearly exterminated 

 in the vicinity the dog teams had to be cut down. 



It was a great disappointment to me that Pammiungittok, Hit- 

 koak's father-in-law, the patriarch of the village who had seen 

 Collinson in 1852, had now become decrepit and had apparently 

 lost his memory. In 1911 he told me at length and most inter- 

 estingly about the visit to Collinson's ship. He made it clear 

 then that while he remembered being on the ship as a boy of five or 

 six, the things he was telling me were not really remembered from 

 that time but rather from the stories which he had absorbed as a 

 boy and young man from the elder people who had been in the 

 same party that visited Collinson. He told me then traditions 

 of the inhabitants of Banks Island and described vividly the dis- 

 covery and later plundering of McClure's ship in Mercy Bay. 

 He gave me the names of distant people, such for instance as the 

 Turnunirohirmiut, who lived in some island far to the northeast 

 which he had never visited but of which he had heard many stories. 

 At the time I entered this name in my notebook I thought that 

 these would probably turn out to be a mythical people, but I dis- 

 covered later that Dr. Boas when in Baffin Island in the early 80's 

 learned that people of this name inhabit Prince of Wales Island. 

 Thus was the the old man's general reliability established.* 



It had been one of my dreams to spend weeks with this inter- 

 esting old man, recording the information which I had found by test 

 to be exceptionally reliable as Eskimo stories go. This was now 

 hopeless. All he seemed to remember about Collinson's ship was 

 that he had been on board of it and I could not without prompting 

 get from him even the same stories that he had already told me. 

 I tried to question his sons, Kitirkolak and Alunak, but their infor- 

 mation was very vague and much mixed with miracles and obvious 



*See "Anthropological Papers of the Stefansson- Anderson Arctic Expe- 

 dition," p. 38. 



