Summer Life 121 



CHAPTER X 

 SUMMER LIFE 



A great change comes over the Copper Eskimo world each year in the month 

 of May. The sun circles constantly round in the sky, never setting below the 

 horizon. During the warmer hours of noon the snow that covers both sea and 

 land begins to glisten and melt, then in the cooler hours of the night it freezes 

 again, offering a firm resistance to the traveller's sled. Already in a few exposed 

 places the ground shows brown and bare, but the streams and lakes are still 

 ice-bound, and the valleys filled with soft, deep snow. The birds are returning. 

 Throughout the winter a few ravens haunt the Eskimo settlements, and here 

 and there is found a solitary snowy owl or one or two ptarmigan. But now the 

 snow-buntings appear, and ptarmigan that herald the caribou, soon to be followed 

 by ducks and geese and a multitude of other birds, both large and small. The 

 seals emerge from their holes and bask in the sunshine on the surface of the ice, 

 while from far to the southward come countless herds of caribou streaming north 

 to their summer pasture grounds. 



The Eskimo, too, feels the quickening of nature and bestirs himself to new 

 activities. Tents and household goods are all overhauled, and new and fighter 

 clothes brought out to meet the warmer weather. His outer boots are now of 

 seal-skin, which will not spoil in the slushy snow; often, too, he wears a seal- 

 skin coat. The season for sealing is now rapidly drawing to a close, and certain 

 economic factors, varying from district to district, govern the movements of 

 the natives as soon as it is over. One group will hasten shorewards and vanish 

 immediately into the interior, while another will linger for several weeks along 

 the coast. But before each group finally takes its departure inland it is careful 

 to deposit on the coast all its surplus winter gear and clothing, as well as stores 

 of blubber that will provide fuel and light when the summer days are over 

 and winter grips the land once more. 



The safest place for a cache is on an island close to shore, where foxes, 

 wolves and wolverines cannot reach it in summer across the water. Wolver- 

 ines, the most destructive of all the animals in the north, are fairly 

 numerous at the mouth of the Coppermine river; consequently the natives of 

 that region cache their goods on one of the Moore islands, and cross by sled to 

 the mainland before the ice breaks up, which usually takes place some time in 

 June. In the spring of 1914 some of the Noahognik EsMmos cached their 

 possessions on Chantry island; and in 1916 Ikpakhuak and others used the island 

 at the entrance of Bernard harbour for the same purpose. Ikpakhuak stored 

 his blubber there while the ice was still solid, but left his clothing till June, 

 when he ferried it across on his kayak. On the mainland the Eskimos choose 

 as far as possible places that are least accessible to animals; for instance, 

 in 1915, at Cape Wollaston, in Bathurst inlet, they left a cac'he on top of a huge 

 crag so steep and high that not even a wolverine could scale its sides. Crags 

 such as this, however, are rare, and most of the Eskimos' caches are simply 

 built up with boulders, while articles of stone and wood, which cannot be 

 damaged by beasts of prey, are left exposed on the surface. Thus in 1914 we 

 found some caches of the Noahognik Eskimos at the fishing creek near Bernard 

 harbour. There were four boards resting on the ground, and, on top of them, 

 a soapstone lamp and a wooden bowl, the latter weighed down with stones to 

 keep it from being blown away. Near them were three stone cairns. One en- 

 closed a large poke full of blubber; in the second we could see only a few sticks. 

 The interior of the third was not visible at all, but inserted upright between the 



