LEARNING TO LIVE AS AN ESKIMO 69 



any. But that was not why I was hunting. I was trying 

 to get up an appetite. I would commonly start, without 

 breakfast, at any time from five to nine in the morning 

 and would walk until from four to six in the afternoon. 

 When the Eskimos saw me coming across the hills to- 

 wards camp, if was the regular job of Navalluk, the little 

 ten-year-old daughter of Roxy, to pick out a salmon 

 trout just fresh from the water and weighing about a 

 pound and a half. She would clean it and put it on a 

 spit beside the camp fire and have it beautifully roasted 

 against my arrival. Had I been a normal person fond 

 of fish I should have found it delicious. As a matter of 

 fact I used to nibble chiefly at those parts that had been 

 burnt nearly to a crisp in the roasting, leaving untasted 

 what another would have eaten by preference. 



But gradually and almost without noticing it, I began 

 to eat more and more of the fish, until at the end of ten 

 days or so I was eating square meals. For a while it 

 was only the best fish specially prepared, but in another 

 week or two I began to join the Eskimos at their potfuls 

 of boiled fish. They told me that fish heads were best 

 of all, but this I could not believe, and it was not until 

 midwinter that I finally decided to try. I found then 

 that they were right and have since agreed that the heads 

 are the best parts of most fishes. Later I came to find 

 that this applies to caribou no less, and I am now of the 

 opinion that heads generally are the best parts of ani- 

 mals, or at least seem so to people who are living on an 

 exclusively meat diet. The northern meat-eating Indians 

 all agree with the Eskimos in this, and so do all those 

 white men I know who have ever lived for long periods 

 on a hundred per cent, meat diet. 



Our fishing methods at Shingle Point were peculiar. 



