INNUIT LIFE AND LAND. 395 



is carried abroad, and be is made famous for life among his 

 fellows. 



It has akeady been mentioned that many individuals give away 

 all their property on such occasions. If it happens that during 

 such a memorial feast a visitor arrives from a distant village who 

 bears the same name with the subject of a celebration, he is at 

 once overwhelmed with gifts, clothed anew from head to foot with 

 the most expensive garments, and returns to his home a wealthy 

 man. 



The country in which the Innuit lives is one that taxes the ut- 

 most hardihood of man when it is traversed by land or by sea. It 

 is not likely that it Avill ever be much frequented by white men — it 

 will remain to us as it has been to the Russians, an immense area 

 of desolate sameness, almost unknown to xis, or to its savage occu- 

 pants, for that matter. The general contour of the great Alaskan 

 mainland interior is that of a vast undulating plain with high 

 rounded granitic hills and ridges scattered in all lines of projection ; 

 on the flanks of which, and by its countless lakes and water-courses, 

 a growth, more or less abundant, of spruce, birch, willows, poj)lars, 

 and a large number of hardy shrubs, will be encountered. Its 

 summers are short, warm, and pleasant ; its winters are long, and 

 bitterl}- cold and inclement. 



The tundra, however, which fronts the whole of that extensive 

 coast-line of Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, is indeed cheerless 

 and repellant at any season. I21 the summer it is a great flat swale, 

 full of bog-holes, shiny and decaying peat, innumerable sloughs, 

 shallow and stagnant, and from which swarms of malignant mos- 

 quitoes rise to fairly torture and destroy a traveller unless he be 

 clad in a coat of mail. In the winter and early spring fierce gales 

 of wind at zero-temperature sweep over these steppes of Alaska in 

 constant succession, making travel exceedingly dangerous, and as 

 painful even as it is in the warmer months. During this period 

 of the year all approach to the coast is barred in Bering Sea by a 

 system of shoals and banks which extend so far seaward that a 

 vessel drawing only ten feet of water will be hard aground, beyond 

 the sight of land, sixty miles off the Yukon mouth. 



At the head of the Bay of Bristol a small but deep and rapid 

 river empties a flood of pure, clear water into an intricate series of 

 sand and mud channels which belong there. The Kvichak is the 

 name of this stream, and it rises less than forty miles away in the 



