arene MUSIC. 385 
They also amuse themselves in the winter by sliding on their knees 
down the steepest snowdrifts under the cliffs. A good deal of the 
time, however, they are following their parents or other grown people, 
catching little fish or fetching twigs for firewood or helping drive the 
dogs, though as a rule they are not made to do any regular work until 
they are pretty well grown. 
MUSIC, 
Musical instruments.—The only musical instrument in use among these 
people is the universal drum! or tambourine (kélyau), consisting of a 
membrane stretched over a hoop with a handle on one side, and used 
from Greenland to Siberia. It is always accompanied by the voice 
singing or chanting. The player holds the handle in his left hand with 
the membrane away from him, and strikes alternately on each side of 
the rim with a short heavy piece of ivory, or a long sleuder wand, ro- 
tating the drum slightly at the same time 
to meet the stroke. This produces a loud, 
resonant, and somewhat musical note. There 
appears, however, to be no system of tuning 
these drums, the pitch of the note depending 
entirely on accident. 
We collected four of these drums, of which 
every household possesses at least one. 
They are all of essentially the same con- 
struction, but vary in size. No. 56741 [79], 
Fig. 383, has been selected as the type. The 
frame is a flat strip of willow 67 inches long, 
1 inch wide, and 0-3 inch thick, bent till the 
two ends meet, thus making a hoop 22-2 
inches long and 19 inches wide. The ends 
are fastened together by a strap of walrus 
ivory on the inside of the hoop, secured to 
the wood by neat stitches of black whalebone. The handle is of walrus 
ivory 5:2 inches long. The larger end is rather rudely carved into a 
haman face. Back of this head and 1 inch from the large end of th2 
handle is a square tranSverse notch, deep and sufficiently wide to fit 
over both rim and strap at the joint. Itis held on by a lashing of sinew 
braid passing through holes in rim and strap, one on each side of the 
handle, and a large transverse hole in the latter, below and a little in 
front of the notch. The membrane, which appears to be a sheet of the 
peritoneum of a seal, is stretched over the other side of the hoop, which 
is beveled on the outside edge, and its edge is brought down to a deep 
Fig. 383.—Drum. 
1 Nordenskiéld calls this ‘the drum, or more correctly, tambourine, so common among most of the 
Polar peoples, European, Asiatic, and American; among the Lapps, the Samoyeds, the Tunguses, and 
the Eskimo.” (Vega, vol. 2, p. 128). 
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