306 THE POINT BARROW ESKIMO. 
sharp edge of ivory is the tool universally employed whenever snow is 
to be shoveled, either to clear it away or for excavating houses or pit- 
falls in the snowdrifts, or “ chinking” up the crevices in the walls of 
the snow house, and is an indispensable part of the traveler’s outfit in 
winter. The shovels (pi/ksun) are all made on essentially the same pat- 
tern, which is well shown by Fig. 306a, No. 56739 [50]. The blade is 14 
inches broad and 11 long. The whole upper surface of the shovel 
is flat. The handle is beveled off on the side to a rounded edge 
below, and is quite thick where it joins the blade, tapering off to the tip. 
The blade is thick and abruptly rounded off on the upper edge below 
and gradually thinned down to the edge. The edge of the wood is 
fitted with a tongue into a grove in the top of the ivory edge, which is 
14 inches deep. It is fastened on by wooden tree-nails at irregular 
intervals, and at one end, where the edge of the groove has been broken, 
by a stitch of black whalebone. The wooden part of the shovel is made 
of four unequal pieces of spruce, neatly fitted and doweled together 
and held by the ivory edge and three stitches of black whalebone 
close to the upper edge, and countersunk below the flat surface. The 
whippings of sinew braid on the handle are to give a firm grip for 
the hands. 
No. 56738 [27], Fig. 306), is a similar shovel of the same material 
and almost exactly the same dimensions, figured to show the way it 
has been pieced together and mended. The maker of this shovel was 
able to procure a broad piece of wood which only had to be pieced out 
with a narrow strip on the left side, which is fastened on as before. It 
was, however, not long enough to make the whole of the handle, which 
has a piece 84 inches long, neatly scarfed on at the end and secured by 
six stout treenails of wood; three at each end of the joint, passing 
through the thin part of the scarf into the thick, but not through the latter. 
Nearly the whole handle was seized with sinew braid put on as before, 
but much of this seizing is broken off. At the right side of the blade 
the grain takes a twist, bringing it parallel to the ivory edge, and ren- 
dering it liable to split, as has happened from the warping of the ivory 
since the shovel has been in the Museum. The owner sought to pre- 
vent this by fastening to the edge a stout “ strap” of walrus ivory 44 
inches, which appears to be an old bird spear point. The lower end of 
this fitted into the groove of the ivory edge, and it was held on by three 
equidistant lashings of narrow whalebone, each running through a 
hole in the edge of the wood and round the ivory in a deep transverse 
groove. 
This pattern of snow shoyel is very like that from Iglulik, figured by 
Capt. Lyon,' but the handle of the latter is so much shorter in propor- 
tion to the blade that there is an additional handle like that of a pot 
lid near the head of the blade on the upper surface. The ivory edge 
also appears to be fastened on wholly with stitches. 
! Parry's Second Voy., pl. opposite p. 548, Fig. 5. 
