4 Social Life among our Aborigines. [ January, 
very thought was hateful to her. Then came a misfortune. 
While she was off with a salmon fishing party, preparing the win- 
ter store of dried fish, her parents and entire family went south- 
ward to another village on their way to set their nets elsewhere. 
During the salmon fishery it is against Eskimo ethics to boil 
water inside the house. It is bad for the fishery. The soup-pot 
was set near the beach and while the others were collecting bits 
of driftwood, the youngest child, a few years old, moved thereto 
by sorcery on the part of the Indians of the interior, threw grass 
and poisonous plants into the boiling pot. All ate and died. 
Poor Atleak was thus left an orphan with no means of support; 
the inhabitants of the village where they died claiming the prop- 
erty left by her family, and doubtless converting such of it as was 
not destroyed at the interment to their own use long before the 
news reached Shaktolik. 
She immediately claimed the protection of an only and very 
distant relative by marriage, in whose house she worked and by 
her neat sewing and constant industry kept herself supplied 
(through barter of work for skins) with clothing and other neces- 
saries which were not hers by the communal bond of the tribe. 
_ Shortly afterward winter set in and she went northward with a 
_ party bound for Kotzebue Sound. It was a hard winter, the deer 
-~ retreated to the most inaccessible valleys, the supply of fish failed. 
_ Her party finding that they could not rely on obtaining food at 
their various bivouacs, were obliged through semi-starvation to 
take a short cut to the Sound through the territory of the dreaded 
and hated Indians. 
Traveling as rapidly as possible, one day they came upon a 
little open spot by the bank of a stream where were two Indian 
houses. The few footprints in the snow were of women’s feet, 
and curiosity tempted the boldest to peep into one of the houses. 
The inhabitants were dead or dying of starvation. The men were 
seeking the deer faraway. The women had denied themselves 
to save little bits for a child some two years old, whose thin cheeks 
were rosy compared with the wasted ones of his dying relatives. 
Death was surely coming to them, and after that what but death 
remained for the boy? They begged the shrinking Eskimo to 
take him and keep him, that his life might be saved. But the 
race-hatred was too strong and they had hardly food enough to 
keep their own party alive. One by one refused. ce 
At last the girl who had lost her lover, who was an orphan (as 
