MURDOCH. ] BONE CRUSHERS. 93 
they use for holding water, ete., and sometimes fit with bails of string 
or wire, so as to use them for cooking porridge, etc., over the lamp. 
They had learned the value of these as early as Maguire’s time,! as had 
the people of Plover Bay in 1849. 
Bone crushers—In preparing food it is often desirable to break the 
large bones of the meat, both to obtain the marrow and to facilitate the 
trying out of the fat for making the pemmican already described. Deer 
bones are crushed into a sort of coarse bone-meal for feeding the dogs 
when traveling. For this purpose heavy short-handled stone mauls are 
used. These tools may have been formerly serviceable as hammers for 
driving treenails, ete., as the first specimen obtained was described as 
“savik-pidjik-nunamisini/ktue-kau/te” (literally ‘‘iron-not-dead-ham- 
mer”), or the hammer used by those now dead, who had no iron. For 
this purpose, however, they are wholly superseded by iron hammers, 
and are now only used for bone crushers. The collection contains a 
large series of these implements, namely, 15 complete mauls and 13 
unhafted heads. <All are constructed on the same general plan, con- 
sisting of an oblong roughly cylindrical mass of stone, with flat ends, 
mounted on the expanded end of a short haft, which is applied to the 
middle of one side of the cylinder and is slightly curved, like the handle 
of an adz. Such a haft is frequently made of the “branch” of a rein- 
deer antler, and the expanded end is made by cutting off a portion of 
the “beam” where the branch joins it. A haft so made is naturally 
elliptical and slightly curved at right angles to the longer diameter of 
the ellipse, and is applied to the head so that the greatest thickness 
and therefore the greatest strength comes in the line of the blow, as in 
a civilized ax or hammer. The head and haft are held together by a 
lashing of thong or three-ply braid of sinew, passing through a large 
hole in the large end of the haft and round the head. This lashing is 
put on wet and dries hard and tight.’ It follows the same general plan 
in all the specimens, though no two are exactly alike. The material of 
the heads, with three exceptions (No. 56631 [222], gray porphyry; No. 
89654 [906], black quartzite, and No. 89655 [1241], coarse-grained gray 
syenite), is massive pectolite (see above, p. 60), generally of a pale greenish 
or bluish gray color and slightly translucent, sometimes dark and opaque. 
No. 56635 [243] will serve as the type of these implements.* 
The head is of light bluish gray pectolite, and is lashed with a three- 
ply braid of reindeer sinew to a haft of some soft coniferous wood, prob- 
ably spruce, rather smoothly whittled out and soiled by handling. The 
transverse ridge on the under side of the butt is to keep the hand from 
slipping off the grip. The whole is dirty and shows signs of consider- 
able age. 
1See Further Papers, ete., p. 909. 
? Hooper, Tents, ete., p. 57. 
3 We saw this done on No. 56634 [83], the head and haft of which were brought in separate and put 
together by an Eskimo at the station. 
4Figured in Ray’s Point Barrow Report, Ethnology, Pl. u, Fig. 6. 
