40 THE ESKIMO ABOUT BERING STRAIT (ETH. ANN. 18 
All along the coast where seals are hunted on the ice during the 
spring months, huge mittens of white bearskin or white dogskin are 
made to reach from the hand to a little above the elbows. These are 
worn by the hunters, while creeping prone upon the ice, to serve as a 
shield, the left arm being carried bent across in front of the face and 
head as the hunter slowly creeps along. The bushy white hair on the 
mitten, being similar in color to the surface of the snow, serves as a blind 
to prevent the seal from observing the approach of the hunter. 
FOOT-WEAR 
BOOTS 
Among the Eskimo boots are the most common style of foot-wear; 
they are made with a hard-tanned sealskin sole and a top reaching just 
below the knee. The tops are generally of sealskin tanned with the 
hair left on, or of reindeer-skin tanned in the same manner. The seal- 
skin boots of this class may have the hair side worn either inward or 
outward; for this purpose the skin of the Phoca vitulina is most com- 
monly used. When topped with reindeer-skin, the hair is worn usually 
outward. The feet and ankles of the latter variety of boots are made 
of reindeer-skin in the brown, short-hair summer coat; the legs are 
made usually in some pattern formed by combining pieces of the white- 
hair skin from the belly of a reindeer with strips of brown-hair skin 
from the legs of that animal. For this purpose skin from the white- 
hair tame reindeer of Siberia is highly prized. The tops of the boot- 
legs are surrounded usually by one or two bands of white-hair deerskin 
with the fur shaved close to present a velvety surface, the seams along 
these borders having narrow strips of black skin welted in with little 
tufts of red worsted strung along some of the seams. Between these 
bands of shaved skin and the lower portion of the legs commonly is 
sewed a strip of wolverine skin, with long projecting hair, and gener- 
ally two or more little tassels of the same kind of skin hanging before 
and behind. The soles are of hard, oil-tanned sealskin bent up around 
the border and crimped about the heel and the toe by means of a 
smooth, pointed ivory crimper. The uppers are frequently sewed 
directly to the sealskin soles, but sometimes a narrow intervening 
strip of tanned sealskin is sewed in around the border. A long, nar- 
row strip of rawhide has one end sewed to the sole on each side of 
the ankle to fasten the boot to the foot. These straps are raised and 
drawn across the rear just above the heel and then passed around in 
front of the ankle and back again, and may be tied either in front 
or on the sides. At the top the boots are fastened tightly over the 
trousers by means of a drawstring. This style of boot is common from 
the lower Yukon to the Arctic coast northward of Kotzebue sound. 
The specimen from Kotzebue sound shown in plate xX1, 12, is a typical 
example of this style of foot-wear, but the pattern of ornamentation 
varies according to individual fancy. 
