AN ARCTIC CHRISTMAS 125 



hunters in the mountains, from whom we had fetched the 

 caribou meat in October. It stood just within the fringe 

 of spruce trees that surround the Eskimo Lakes. Well 

 formed trees thirty and forty feet in height are not rare. 

 From these white men could easily build log cabins of 

 the type we have all seen either in pictures or otherwise. 

 That sort of cabin, as I know from ample experience, 

 takes a long time to erect and is difficult to build so well 

 that it keeps out the cold adequately. Three or four 

 Eskimos can build in a day or two as big a house as three 

 or four white men could build in a week or two and the 

 Eskimo house will be much warmer. 



The chief reason for the ease of making the Eskimo 

 house is that the walls instead of being vertical, slant in 

 just a little. If a house has a vertical wall and if you 

 try to make it warmer by building a sod wall outside of 

 it, then it takes great skill as well as good sods to build 

 in such a way that there is not an open space between the 

 frame and the sod. But if the wall of the framework 

 leans in a little, you can heap sods and earth up against it 

 any old way and the sods will hug the frame. Kunak told 

 me that it had taken him and the other man three days 

 to build this house. It was hexagonal in outline, about 

 twenty-two feet in length, and fifteen in width. The 

 frame of the walls was of spruce and the roof was of 

 split spruce logs. Outside this the walls were of earth, 

 with a roof covering of moss and a layer of earth over 

 that. There was a great stone fireplace in the center of 

 the house directly under the parchment skylight. 



This was the first Eskimo house I had seen that had 

 windows also in the walls. Each was made of a single 

 pane of ice about an inch thick, two feet wide and four 

 feet high, with the lower edge level with the floor. Al- 



