XII.] 
INVENTORY OF HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE. 
93 
the sea. They are erected and taken down in a few hours. A 
Chukch family can therefore easily change its place of residence, 
and does remove very often from one village to another. Some¬ 
times it appears to own the wooden frame of a tent at several 
places, and in such cases at removal there are 
taken along only the tent covering, the dogs, and ||| 
the most necessary skin and household articles. 
The others are left without inclosure, lock, or 
watch, at the former dwelling-place, and one is 
certain to find all untouched on his return. 
During short stays at a place there are used, 
even when the temperature of the air is con¬ 
siderably under the freezing-point, exceedingly 
defective tents or huts made with the skin 
boats that may happen to be available. Thus a 
young couple who returned in spring to Pitlekaj 
lived happy and content in a single thin and 
ragged tent or conical skin hut which below where 
it was broadest was only two and a half metres 
across. An accurate inventory, which I took 
during the absence of the newly married pair, 
showed that their whole household furniture con¬ 
sisted of a bad lamp, a good American axe, some 
reindeer skins, a small piece of mirror, a great 
many empty preserve tins from the Vega, which 
among other things were used for cooking, a fire- 
drill, a comb, leather for a pair of moccassins, some 
sewing implements, and some very incomplete 
and defective tools. 
The boats are made of walrus skin, sewed together 
and stretched over a light frame-work of wood and pieces of bone. 
The different parts of the frame-work are bound together with 
thongs of skin or strings of whalebone. In form and size the 
Chukches’ large boat, aikuat, called by the Russians haydar, 
CHCKCH OAR. 
One-sixteenth of 
the natural size. 
