384 THE POINT BARROW ESKIMO. 
keeping one ball constantly in the air. Some of the Women are very 
skillful at this, keeping the balls up for a long time. This play is 
accompanied by a chant sung to a monotonous tune with very little 
air, but strongly marked time. I never succeeded in catching the words 
of this chant, which are uttered with considerable rapidity, and do not 
appear to be ordinary words. It begins “yt yar yuka, ye yar yuka;” 
and some of the words are certainly indelicate to judge from the une- 
quivocal gestures by which I once saw them accompanied. 
In the winter the young women and girls are often to be seen tossing 
a snowball with their feet. A girl wets some snow and makes a ball about 
as big as her two fists, which of course immediately becomes a lump of 
ice. This she balances on the toe of one foot and with a kick and a 
jump tosses it over to the other foot which catches it and tosses it back. 
Some women will keep this up for a number of strokes. 
The young people of both sexes also sometimes play football, kicking 
about an old mitten or boot stuffed with rags or bits of waste skin. I 
never saw them set up goals and play a regular game as they did in 
Greenland.! 
The little girls also play with the skipping rope. I once watched 
three little girls jumping. Two swung the rope and the other stood in 
the middle and jumped. First they swung the rope under her feet to 
the right, then back under her feet to the left, and then once or twice 
wholly round under her feet and over her head, and then began again.’ 
They also play at housekeeping, laying sticks round to represent the 
sides of the house, or outlining the house by pressing up ridges of 
snow between their feet. Sometimes they mark out a complicated laby- 
rinth on the snow in this way, and the game appears to be that one 
shall guard this and try to catch the others if they come in, as in many 
of the games of civilized children. 
I have already spoken of the formal children’s dances. They often 
also dance by themselves, beating on old tin cans for drums. One 
night I saw a party of children having quite an elaborate performance 
near our station. The snow at the time was drifted up close under the 
eaves of the house. On the edge of the roof sat three little boys, each 
beating vigorously on an empty tomato can and singing at the top of 
his lungs, while another boy and a little girl were dancing on the snow 
waving their arms and singing as usual, and at the same time trying to 
avoid another girl about thirteen years old, who represented a demon. 
She was stooping forward, and moving slowly round in time with the 
music, turning from side to side and rolling her eyes fiercely, while she 
licked the blade of an open clasp knife, drawing it slowly across her 
lips. ‘They seemed intensely in earnest, and were enjoying themselves 
hugely. After dancing a while at the station they went over to the 
village, and as they told me the next day spent the whole night singing 
in a vacant snow-house. 
1 See Egede, p. 161, and Crantz, vol. 1, p. 177. 
2? Compare Parry’s Second Voyage, p. 541. 
