SPRING JOURNEY IN A SKIN BOAT 199 



The season of spring, while the birds are becoming more 

 numerous day by day and while the snow is slowly disap- 

 pearing, is one of great activity among the Eskimos in 

 getting their boats ready for summer travel. Either be- 

 fore the ice breaks or else just after it does they move 

 from their winter camps to some good fishing locality. 

 These are places where the water is muddy so that the 

 fish cannot see the nets in the perpetual summer daylight. 



On the north coast of Alaska there are about two 

 months when the sun does not set at night. The midnight 

 sun comes before the snow is entirely gone from the 

 prairie and the snow does not come back until long after 

 the sun has begun to set at night. At Flaxman Island 

 where we had the ice-filled ocean outside of us and about 

 three miles of cold water between us and the mainland, 

 the weather never became very hot, but some parties who 

 went inland reported that up towards the mountains it 

 was on an average more than twenty degrees warmer 

 than we had it on the island. This meant that when we 

 were just comfortable at Flaxman Island at a temperature 

 of 55 or 65 °, people in towards the mountains were 

 sweltering at from 75 ° to 85 °, which is very hot indeed up 

 there, for the air is about as humid as air can be, and 

 there is little relief from the heat at night for the sun 

 does not set. 



With the increasing heat came swarms of mosquitoes. 

 We have already described how bad they are on the Mac- 

 kenzie. They were not very bad on Flaxman Island be- 

 cause we had cool breezes from the sea continually, but 

 ten or fifteen miles inland they were just as bad as they 

 are anywhere on the Mackenzie River or as they are any- 

 where in the world. 



Besides mosquitoes, there are many other kinds of fly- 



