278 ICE-BOUND ON KOLGUEV 
labour. The old man led off by splitting them with his 
axe, the women and elder girls gutted them; then they 
threw them on to the children, who took out the gizzards 
and chopped off the beaks. These were carefully pre- 
served threaded on strings. Some were then used as 
necklaces and ornaments for the hair; some as beads for 
the little dolls, or, as they call them, ‘ooquoh.’ These 
are made to imitate fathers and mothers of a family, 
sons, babies, and so on. 
Why does Nordenskidld put these Samoyeds at the 
bottom of the Arctic Mongol group? He makes them 
the lowest. And why does Carlyle, casting about for 
an instance of hopeless barbarity, pitch on the poor 
Samoyed? This book, if it shows anything, will surely 
reveal the Samoyed as an extremely intelligent man, far 
and away more so than the Red Indian. 
Take Mekolka. Mekolka had been born and bred on 
Kolguev. He was now about seventeen, and until last 
year had not known how to read or write. Then with the 
Russians in the summer crossed the Prophet, Onaska, who 
had learnt in the Archangel school. Through the winter 
he taught the boy Mekolka, and now this lad could not 
only spell out Russian slowly, but write quite fairly well. 
‘His father, who had always used the notched stick for 
his calculations, now trusted much to Mekolka’s powers. 
I used sometimes to have a sense (which I never had 
with the Indians) that these were, so to say, our own 
natives, just English yeomen families, or so. The very 
