504 W. Thalbitzer 



preparing these small fishes for winter food is carried on and during 

 this time the naked rocks near the shore are covered with thousands 

 of fishes spread out to be dried. This being done the women sit 

 down among the piles of fish, make a hole through each fish and 

 string them together in long broad bands. Lastly, these are packed 

 up into large rolls and carried home by boat to the winter settle- 

 ment (see fig. 222). 



In the autumn (in September) the women have to do a kind of 

 harvesting work; together with the children they go up the grassy 

 slopes or into the valleys to gather black crowberries (pukukkät) 

 and edible herbs, especially a species of stone-crop {torte^'^ruat) and 

 angelica {quaralik) which are eaten raw or frozen in blubber for 

 the winter. The first-named has a cabbage-like taste, the last is 

 very aromatic. Also the roots can be eaten; those of the angelica 

 contain a strong juice, which burns the tongue, before the importa- 

 tion of tobacco the only stimulus known. To get these herbs the 

 women are often obliged to make day-long excursions by boat into 

 the corners of the fjord where the slopes and valleys with a rich 

 vegetation are found. On the way they also gather mussels at the 

 places where these are known to occur. But the last resource dur- 

 ing hard winter times are all the different kinds of sea-weed. 



On the preparation of the skins and their use (cf p. 34). — 

 At Ammassalik seal skins are scraped and tanned in the following 

 way: first the woman with her knife (cakke) cuts away the blubber 

 from the skin which is placed on the scraping foot-stool (qapiarpik), 

 a flat narrow board of wood with two short feet under the front 

 part. With the same knife she then removes the thin layer of 

 blubber, the so-called mame, lying like a slimy membrane inner- 

 most on the seal-skin; (the mame is eaten as a special dish). The 

 skin is then washed and rubbed with water. This being done she 

 scrapes the skin for the last time with a special kind of scraper 

 (kileet) which is either a piece of bear's bone or more often a mus- 

 sel (kileetaq); also pumice-stone may be used for this purpose (cf. 

 p. 2Г). During the last scraping process the skin is generally placed 

 on a quite flat cutting-board {qeerpik, fig. 226). Thus cleaned the 

 skin is stretched with pegs on the earth or snow for drying (cf. 

 fig. 86). Lastly it is put down into one of the large vessels filled 

 with urine standing near the window platform and when all the 

 fat has come out it is washed in sea-water, wrung and rubbed with 

 the hands to make it soft and dried for the second time. It seems 

 in the main to be dependent upon how long the skin remains in 

 the urine whether in the end it becomes a black skin (mattaaq, 



