154 A YEAR WITH A WHALER 



masticating a dainty tidbit. Did she expector- 

 ate? Not a drop. She evidently did not pro- 

 pose to waste any of the flavor of that good 

 weed. Neither did she get sick — that pretty 

 Eskimo girl. At last when she had chewed for 

 twenty minutes or so, she removed her quid and 

 stuck it behind her right ear. She chewed it at 

 intervals later on, always between times wearing 

 it conspicuously behind her ear. 



I rather expected our guests would depart 

 after a call of an hour or so. Not so. They 

 had come to stay indefinitely. When they be- 

 came tired they lay on deck — it didn't make any 

 particular difference where — and went quietly 

 to sleep. They seemed to have no regular time 

 for sleeping. I found Eskimos asleep and 

 awake during all my deck watches. As it was 

 day all the twenty-four hours, I wondered if 

 these people without chronometers did not some- 

 times get their hours mixed up. 



New parties of Eskimos kept coming to see 

 us. One of these had killed a walrus and the 

 skin and the raw meat, butchered into portable 

 cuts, lay in the bottom of their big family canoe 



