408 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



"mahklok" seal-oil. These big phocaceans are almost as great 

 fishermen as the Innuits are themselves, and find the mouth of the 

 Kuskokvim as attractive as it is to their human foes. In this frame 

 of mind the mahklok ventures on to those tidal banks of the estuary 

 below, and this rash habit enables the natives to capture a great 

 many of them there every year. Those Innuits below Kolmakovsky 

 have no land-furs whatever, save a few inferior mink-skins ; but 

 they trade their surplus seal-oil with the Indians above and on the 

 Yukon for that ground-squirrel parka and tanned moose-skin shirt 

 which they universally wear. There is an exceeding rankness to 

 an odor of rancid fish-oil, but the aroma from a bag of putrescent 

 seal-oil is simply abominable and stifling to a Caucasian nose an 

 acrid funk, which pervades everything, and hangs to it for an indefin- 

 ite length of time afterward in spite of every effort made to disinfect. 



The Indians of the Upper Kuskokvim were once said to be a 

 very numerous tribe ; but the severity of successive cold winters 

 has so destroyed them, as a people, that to-day they exist there as 

 a feeble remnant only of what they once were. An intelligent 

 trader, Sipari, who has traversed their entire country, in 1872-76, 

 declares that "forty tents," or one hundred souls is an ample enu- 

 meration of their number. 



The Innuits of the Lower Kuskokvim are much better physical 

 specimens of humanity than are those of their race living on the 

 Lower Yukon. These latter are called by all traders the most 

 clumsy and degraded of Alaskan savages. The portage from Kol- 

 makovsky to the Kvichpak is only three days' journey in winter, or 

 five days by water in canoes, during summer. It is a trip made by 

 large numbers of the natives of both streams, in the progress of 

 their natural barter and moose-hunting. 



The forests of the Kuskokvim and the Nooshagak mountains 

 and uplands are frequently swept by terrible conflagrations, which 

 utterly destroy whole areas of timber as far as the eye can reach. 

 This ruin of fire, of course, absolutely extinguishes all trapping for 

 any fur-bearing animal hitherto found in those brule tracts, and en- 

 tails much privation upo^ the natives who have been accustomed to 

 gain their best livelihood largely by hunting in those sections. A 

 burnt district presents a desolate front for years after ; the fire 

 does not, in its swift passage, do more, at first, than burn the foli- 

 age and smaller limbs of trees in a dense spruce forest ; but it 

 roasts the bark and kills a trunk, so that all sap-circulation is forever 



