148 Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913-18 



Our "tsh" is attaho or atta, the latter being used also towards dogs. If the other 

 hunter is some distance away the Eskimo sometimes croaks like a raven to 

 put him on his guard. For "come quickly" the hunter holds the forearm vertical 

 and moves it rapidly up and down as in our military signal "double march." 

 Waving the coat over the head upward means "come", downward towards the 

 ground "go back." The hunter announces his success by running from side to 

 side two or three times/ often following this up by waving his coat upward, 

 when the women or children go over with the sled or pack-straps and carry 

 home the meat. To answer a signal, showing that it has been observed, bow 

 two or three times towards the ground. The two animals that are considered 

 the most dangerous, polar and brown bears, have a special signal. The hunter 

 capers first on one foot, then on the other, waving his arms or his coat above 

 his head.^ 



Signs or landmarks, nakkatain, are often erected to guide the hunter back 

 to camp, or to point out the spot where meat has been cached. Thus a hunter 

 who is unable to carry home all his spoils will erect two triangular or rectangular 

 snow-blocks about a hundred yards apart, on rising ground if possible, so that 

 the person sent out to bring in the meat will sight their broad surfaces from a 

 distance, and know the direction of the cache. In summer, when there is no 

 snow on the ground, large stones are used in exactly the same way; the Eskimos 

 often cap them with black turf to make them more conspicuous. Ikpakhuak 

 and I killed two caribou one day, and, not being able to carry all the meat back 

 to camp, we piled most of it in a heap on top of a ridge, and surrounded it with 

 five stones capped with sods, so that. Higilak might find it more easily the next 

 day. On another occasion we were returning to camp after a day spent in 

 hunting, and came upon three fresh snow-blocks in line with one another and 

 about twenty yards apart. They pointed directly toward the tents of the 

 Eskimos on the other side of the ridge, and. had been set up expressly to guide 

 us thither, for the camp had been moved during our absence. 



The same word nakkatain is used for the stones that a hunter often places 

 on the spot where he has killed his quarry. They are found most frequently 

 near pits, tallut, where the archers have lain concealed during organized deer 

 drives, and from which they have launched their shafts. On the site where a 

 caribou has fallen the victorious hunter places a small black stone on top of a 

 larger white one, or vice versa, the main object being to make it conspicuous. 

 The stones vary in size according to the size of the caribou killed, large ones for 

 a bull and small ones for a fawn. Sometimes one finds three or four such marks 

 near a single pit, and then the suspicion arises that some wandering hunter, 

 lighting on the pit, has left these supposititious records by way of a joke. Ikpak- 

 huak was doing this one day in the fall of 1915; he set up nakkatain beside 

 every pit that we came across in our hunting. Such records therefore are not 

 to be relied upon. Yet there is one point in connection with them that is worth 

 noticing; they rarely lie more than twenty paces from the pits, showing how 

 close the Eskimo needs to be before he can launch a shaft with any certainty of 

 success. 



As long asthe natives used only bows and arrows comparatively few caribou 

 were shot by individuals hunting alone. The majority were obtained in 

 drives, when the animals were either herded through narrow gaps where the 

 archers lay concealed in shallow pits, or were driven into the lakes and speared 

 while swimming. Richardson saw this latter method carried out on the Rae 

 river. "The more active of the natives," he says, "go at this season to the 

 meadows which we had crossed the previous day, and gradually drive the 



»The same signal is used to announce the arrival of friendly strangers. Cf. Stefansson, My Life with 

 the Eskimo, p. 280. 



•Boas, Bulletin A.M.N.H., Vol. XV, 1907, p. 266, gives an illustration of this signal from Hudson 

 bay, but calls it the musk-ox signal. 



