302 THE POINT BARROW ESKIMO. 
skin, gathering and stretching the strip with the left hand. They do 
this work quite rapidly and with great skill, cutting single lines upward 
of 90 feet long and only one-eighth inch in diameter, alinost perfectly 
even. These fine lines of seal-skin thong, which serve a great variety of 
purposes, are usually made when they are in the summer camps, before 
the breaking up of the ice. They are dried by stretching them between 
stakes 6 inches or a foot high, driven into the ground. 
The stout thongs of the hide of the bearded seal, walrus, or beluga 
are usually made in the winter and stretched to dry between posts of 
whales’ bones set up in the village, about breast high. While they are 
drying, the maker carefully trims and scrapes the edges with his knife, 
so as to make an almost round line.!- The usual diameter is about 0:3 
inch. These lines are not always made with such care, being often 
merely flat thongs. Fine deer-skin twine, or “babiche,” as it is called 
by the voyageurs, for making the nettings of snow shoes, is made in the 
same way. A deer,skin is dampened, rolled up, and put up over the lamp 
for a day or two to remove the hair by sweating, and then cut into a 
single long piece of fine thong. 
All the men do not appear able to do this fine 
work. For instance, our friend Mit/nialu had the 
babiche for his new snowshoes made by his house- 
mate, the younger Tunazu. When it is desired 
to fasten together two pieces of the stouter kinds 
of thong, what I have so often referred to as the 
“double-slit splice” is generally employed. This 
FIG. 302.—Donble-slit splice Ss Made as follows: The two ends to be joined to- 
for rawhide lines. gether are each slit lengthwise, and one is passed 
through the slitin the other. The other end of this piece is then passed 
through the slit in the first piece, and drawn through so that the sides 
of each slit interlace like the loops of a square knot (see diagrams, Fig. 
302). The splice is often further secured by a seizing of sinew braid. 
Most writers on the Eskimo have not gone sufficiently into the details of 
their arts to describe their methods of splicing. One writer,? however, 
in describing some Eskimo implements from Hast Greenland, deseribes 
and figures several splices somewhat of this nature, and one in particu- 
lar especially complicated by crossing the sides of the slits and passing 
the end through several times. This method of uniting thongs is prob- 
ably very general among the Eskimo and is also common enough among 
civilized people. 
BUILDERS’ TOOLS. 
For excavating.—At the present day they are very glad to use white 
men’s picks and shovels when they want to dig in the gravel or clean 
out the ice from their houses. They, however, have mattocks and pick. 
1 Gilder describes a similar process of manufacturing these lines at Hudson’s Bay. (Sehwatka’s 
Search, p. 176.) 
2W. J. Sollas, in Jour. Anthrop. Inst. of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 9, pp. 329-336. 
. 
