92 



OUE ARCTIC PKOVINCE. 



the door is a square aperture cut through the logs at the least ex- 

 posed front, about large enough to easily admit the ingress and 

 egress of a crouching Indian. It is stopped in stormy weather by 

 a bear-skin, hung so as to fall directly over it from the inside. 

 When the door is thus closed the naturall}^ dark interior becomes 

 almost wholly so ; but the howling of a tempest, laden with rain, sleet 

 or snow, as the case may be, renders this gloomy indoor perfectly 

 radiant to the senses of its sheltered inmates, and they loll in robes 

 and blankets and doze away the time on the rude wooden platform 

 which surrounds the walls and keeps their bodies from the cold 

 damp earth. Upon this staging they spread grass mats and skins, 

 and, in fact, it is a catchall for everything. 



The Bedroom Annex of a Kenaitze Rancherie. 



An odd feature seen in some of the most pretentious houses of 

 those inlet savages, is the presence of a little kennel-like bedroom 

 annex, which many of the most wealthy or important have built up 

 against the main walls. These boxlike additions are tightly framed 

 and joined to the houses, the only entrance being from the inside 

 of the main structure by a small hole cut directly throvigh the 

 logs of the wall ; they are sleeping chambers, and are furnished 

 with a rough plank floor, and sometimes a window made of a piece 

 of translucent bladder-gut. They are also reserved and special 

 apartments during the occasion of those visits of ceremony which 

 Indians often pay, one to each other. But the main idea is to 

 have these tight little dormitories so snug and warm that they will 

 insure the comfortable rest of the owner therein without much 

 burdensome bed-clothing— in many cases the Kenaitze can sleep 



