KEEPING WARM 
and each hair is filled with air cells. The 
fur is short but very warm; the skin is 
light but very strong. 
The Eskimos made every effort to kill 
caribou for winter clothing (and for 
food) in August and early September 
when the fur is of optimum quality. 
Seven skins were required to dress a 
man, six for a woman, and four for a 
child. The skins were carefully cleaned 
of meat and fat, and laid hair-down 
upon pebbly ground to dry as quickly as 
possible. Once dry, the skins were 
scraped with several different types of 
bone or stone scrapers — a hard and te- 
dious task shared by men and women — 
until they were as soft as chamois 
leather. An experienced Eskimo seam- 
stress could take the measure of her 
man at a glance, cut the required pat- 
terns from the skins with her ulu, the 
half-moon-shaped woman’s knife, then 
sew the pieces together with closely 
spaced, overcast stitches. Dried caribou 
(or narwhal or beluga whale) sinew was 
her thread, ideal because it is very 
strong and molds itself to leather but 
does not tear it. Her thimble was made 
of musk ox horn or of depilated bearded 
seal leather; her needle of the hard wing 
bone of a gull or goose. 
A complete winter outfit consisted of 
an inner parka worn with the hair 
against the body, an outer parka worn 
fur-out, inner and outer pants worn in 
the same manner, fur stockings, boots, 
and mittens. Wolverine fur (or that of 
wolf or dog) was used for the ruff of the 
loose-fitting parka hood because hoar- 
frost formed by breath could easily be 
brushed from it. Stockings were made 
of caribou fur or the down-soft fur of 
arctic hare; the boot sole from extremely 
strong, stiff bearded seal leather; the 
upper portion of the boot of ringed seal 
leather. A layer of dried grass, usually 
replaced each day, was put into the boot 
to form an insole that provided extra 
insulation and absorbed moisture. Mit- 
tens were made of caribou skin, often 
with a palm inset of durable seal leather. 
The entire outfit weighed just above ten 
pounds. It was loose and airy enough to 
avoid sweating, yet warm enough to 
enable a hunter, as the Danish ethnolo- 
gist Knud Rasmussen observed, to stand 
“motionless as a statue” above a seal’s 
breathing hole “in a storm and in a 
temperature of about — 50°C.” One 
man, Rasmussen reported, stood thus 
for two days and two nights, tired but 
warm in his superlative clothing. “When 
an Eskimo is well dressed,” said Stefans- 
Aglow from the light of oil lamps, 
an igloo is a winter haven for its 
inhabitants. The air cells within the 
snow are excellent insulation, and 
the residents’ body heat is all that 
is needed to raise the temperature 
inside the igloo 40 degrees above 
that of the outside air. 
son, “his two layers of fur clothing im- 
prison the body heat so effectively that 
the air in actual contact with the skin is 
always at the temperature of a tropical 
summer.” 
In a few places, caribou were not 
available and the Eskimos had to make 
their winter clothes of other materials. 
On the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay, 
adverse weather killed all the caribou in 
the 1880s, and the people made their 
parkas of eider skins — light, warm, but 
fragile. The Polar Eskimos of northwest 
Greenland traditionally wore pants of 
polar bear fur, extremely warm and 
durable, but somewhat hard and heavy. 
In this region, too, caribou had died out 
and the Eskimos made their inner par- 
kas of bird skins (dovekies or murres) 
and their outer parkas of the skins of 
arctic foxes. 
Whatever the material, one thing was 
essential: the clothes had to be perfectly 
dry or they lost their insulating quality. 
At the entrance to each winter home 
stood an anowtaq , a snow beater of bone 
or wood, with which Eskimos brushed 
and beat all snow from their clothes 
before entering. The outer layers of 
clothing were left in a cold, dry ante- 
room igloo, or chamber, and socks, 
boots, and mittens were carefully dried 
each night on a webbed drying rack 
suspended above a seal oil lamp. 
The Eskimos did not relish cold. 
Heaven, they told the explorer Charles 
Francis Hall on Baffin Island in 1862, 
was a place of eternal light and warmth. 
And their vision of hell, as explained to 
Hall, was even chillier and gloomier 
than the mist-shrouded Niflheim of the 
Norse: “Always dark. . . . No sun . . . 
snow flying all the time, terrible storms; 
cold, very cold; and a great deal of ice 
there.” Although they did not like the 
coldness of their land, they did not fear 
it either. Cold was a nuisance rather 
than a threat. Their superb cold-adapted 
culture shielded them from its lethal 
sting. □ 
48 
