TIIE ESQUIMAUX LIMITS. 
211 
The narrow belt subjected to their nomadic range 
cannot be less than six hundred miles long; and 
throughout this extent of country every man knows 
every man. There is not a marriage or a birth or a 
death that is not talked over and mentally registered 
by all. I have a census, exactly confirmed by three 
separate informants, which enables me to count by 
name about one hundred and forty souls, scattered 
along from Kosoak, the Great River at the base of a 
glacier near Cape Melville, to the wind-loved hut of 
Anoatok. 
Destitute as they are, they exist both in love and 
community of resources as a single family. The sites 
of their huts—for they are so few in number as not to 
bear the name of villages—are arranged with reference 
to -the length of the dog-march and the seat of the 
hunt; and thus, when winter has built her highway 
and cemented into one the sea, the islands, and the 
main, they interchange with each other the sympathies 
and social communion of man, and diffuse through the 
darkness a knowledge of the resources and condition 
of all. 
The main line of travel is then as beaten as a road 
at home. The dogs speed from hut to hut, almost 
unguided by their drivers. They regulate their time 
by the stars. Every rock has its name, every hill its 
significance; and a cache of meat deposited anywhere 
in this harsh wilderness can be recovered by the 
voungest hunter in the nation. 
From Cape York to a settlement at Saunders Island, 
