THE LIFE AT TUKTUYAKTOK 141 



it took me half an hour to make a fishing hole ten inches 

 in diameter through three feet of ice, but Ovayuak could 

 do it in a few minutes. For a rod we each had a stick 

 about two feet long and attached to it a slender line of 

 braided caribou sinew about four or five feet long.- On 

 the end of this was a little fish carved out of ivory about 

 two inches in length. A hole had been bored in the head 

 of the fish, a shingle nail stuck through, bent and sharp- 

 ened. This sort of tackle is bait and hook in one. When 

 a fish bites you must not give him any slack; if you do 

 he will get off the hook, for there is no barb to hold him. 

 There are only two tricks in this fishing: one is to keep 

 jiggling the hook so that the ivory fish squirms around 

 in the water much as a live minnow would; the other is 

 to pull suddenly and keep pulling when you have a bite 

 until your catch is on the ice. 



We were getting several kinds of fish; the largest 

 variety are called by the Eskimos sit and by the Hudson's 

 Bay traders connic. The Eskimo name is merely plain 

 Eskimo but the white man's name is said to come from 

 the French 'Tinconnu," which means "the unknown" fish. 

 It is pretty hard to classify. It used to be called "Mac- 

 kenzie River salmon" but now I believe it has been de- 

 cided that it is not a salmon at all. It is a scaly fish with 

 white flesh and may attain a huge size. I have seen some 

 more than three feet in length, weighing over forty pounds 

 and have heard that they sometimes weigh sixty or sev- 

 enty pounds. At Tuktuyaktok we seldom got any weigh- 

 ing more than thirty pounds, and fifteen-pounders were 

 perhaps above the average. 



In six or seven hours of work we would catch on a 

 good day four to eight fish of various sorts, or anything 

 from ten to forty pounds per man. There were seldom 



