402 OUK ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



from the river upon which they build their rude winter villages, and 

 never venture out from its mouth ; hence they are not so happy in 

 making the skin canoe or kayak, as their hardier brethren are : 

 these boats on the Togiak are clumsy, broad of beam in proportion 

 to length, and the hatch, or hole, so large that two persons can sit 

 in it back to back. When a family concludes to go out for the 

 summer camp, the man gets into his "kayak," takes the children 

 who are under four or five years in with him, then pulls and pad- 

 dles his \VSLJ up against the current, or floats down, as the case may 

 be ; the women wife, mother, and daughters are turned ashore 

 and obliged to find their way up or down through long grass and 

 over quaking bogs to toil in this manner from camp to camp, 

 and as they plod along they shout and sing at the top of their 

 voices to apprise any bear or bears, which may be in their path, of 

 such coming, and thus stampede them ; otherwise they would be 

 in continual danger of silently stepping upon bruin as he lurked or 

 slept in dense grassy jungles. When a bear first takes notice of 

 the approach of a human being it invariably slinks away, rarely 

 ever displaying, by the faintest sound, its departure ; but that same 

 animal, if surprised suddenly at close quarters, will turn and fight 

 desperately, even unto death. 



The bold, far-projected headland of Cape Newenham forms the 

 southern pier of that remarkable funnel-like sea-opening to the 

 Kuskokvim River a river upon which the human ichthyophagi of 

 the north do most congregate : three thousand savages are living 

 here in a string of scattered hamlets that closely adjoin each other, 

 and are nearly all located on the right-hand bank of the river as we 

 ascend it. They are more like muskrat villages than human habi- 

 tations water, water all around and everywhere : situated on little 

 patches, or narrow dikes, at the rim of the high tides, on the edge 

 of the river proper, which is here, and for a long distance up, bor- 

 dered by a strikingly desolate and forlorn country. A glance at 

 our map will show to the reader that great funnel-fashioned mouth 

 of the Kuskokvim, through which its strong and turbid, clay-white 

 current is discharged into Bering Sea. The tides, in this enormous 

 estuary, run with a rise and fall that simply beggars description 

 reaching an amazing vertical flow and ebb of fifty feet at the en- 

 trance ! Such extraordinary change in tide-level is carried up, but 

 much modified as it progresses, until lost at Mumtrekhlagamute ; 

 the entire physical aspect of that region, in which this sweeping 



