LEARNING TO BUILD A SNOWHOUSE 157 



sionally it is domino-shaped ; so as just to fit the block 

 which he has ready. He next takes up a particular snow 

 block, trims it so it is a little thinner than the average, 

 puts it on end and lifts it vertically up through the hole, 

 so that if you are outside you can see his two arms stick- 

 ing up through holding the block. He now allows the 

 block to take a horizontal position in his hands and 

 lowers it gently down upon the opening so as to cover 

 it like a lid. The block is somewhat larger than the 

 opening, but with his long knife he trims it down to 

 exact size gradually, and then allows it to slip into 

 place. 



By the time the snow frame of the house was finished 

 Ovayuak's wife had all the crevices chinked up as high 

 as the third tier. The cracks in the roof Ovayuak filled 

 from the inside. When he announced that they had all 

 been filled his wife began to shovel soft snow over the 

 house. She threw shovelfuls up on the dome but none 

 of it stuck there except what filled in the outer part of 

 the crevices that had been chinked from the inside. 

 Sliding down the sides of the house the soft snow formed 

 an embankment all along the bottom of the wall. Even- 

 tually when the shoveling was discontinued, the house 

 no longer looked like a hemisphere or a dome, but almost 

 conical. With the snow piled at the bottom, the walls 

 there were three feet thick. Two feet up, the walls were 

 only eight or ten inches thick, and the roof was four 

 inches — the thickness of the original blocks. 



o 



Ovayuak was now completely shut in, for he had filled 

 up the little hole through which I had been passing the 

 blocks to him. With a shovel his wife now dug a trench 

 about three feet wide down to the river ice, four feet 

 below. As if digging a cave she worked from the end 



