72 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



small pieces of raw steak and similarly I have seen 

 Eskimos on rare occasions take a mouthful of raw fresh 

 fish. 



But fish in another condition they do eat raw. On 

 account of the difficulty of netting in daylight in clear 

 weather, there is little fishing on Shingle Point during 

 the midsummer while the sun never sets. The natives, 

 therefore, look forward eagerly to the coming of the dark 

 nights. A few fish are summer-caught, however, and 

 they are put in bins and protected from the sun by piles 

 of logs. Although it is extremely hot in summer when 

 you are twenty or thirty miles inland (perhaps 80 ° or 

 90 ° in the shade), the temperature on a sandspit sur- 

 rounded by ocean water as Shingle Point was, is seldom 

 above 60 ° or 70 °, and frequently around 40 ° or 50 °. 

 Therefore, the fish did not decay rapidly, but became 

 high, somewhat in the sense in which venison and game 

 are allowed to become high in our markets. Fish that 

 has a high or gamey taste is seldom cooked and indeed 

 seldom eaten at all during the summer. But when winter 

 comes and the fish are frozen, they are sometimes 

 brought into the house in that condition. An armful of 

 them is thrown upon the floor and allowed to lie there 

 until they are half-thawed, so that they are about of the 

 consistency of ice cream — they are still frozen, but 

 nevertheless are so soft you can easily cut them with a 

 knife or bite chunks out of them. At that stag* the skin 

 is stripped off and they are eaten by the i is very 



much as we cat corn on the col). The backbone and 

 ribs form the core and are thrown away or given to the 

 dogs, as we reject the cob after eati the corn. 



At first 1 was horrif seeing people eating high, 



raw fish. But when I came to think of it, it did not seem 



