The bag (fig. 45, 2) is made of reindeer skin. The little bag that hangs from the larger has a double use; it is a receptacle for reserve tinder, but its chief use is for a toggle; being passed under the belt it prevents the loss of the outfit, which is said to be carried by the women. An oblong pad, stuffed with deer hair, is sewed to the mouth of the fire-bag to protect the hand from sparks and blows of the flint. To get a spark, the Eskimo places (fig. 47) the piece of pyrites on the pad held in the left hand over the curved forefinger, the large end down and the thumb set in the cup shaped cavity in the top. The flap of the tinder pocket is turned back and held on the forefinger under the protecting pad. The flint is held in the right hand and by a scraping motion little pieces of pyrites at a dull red heat fall down into the tinder. The pellet that glows is transferred to the pipe or fire, and the flap of the tinder pocket is turned down, serving to keep the tinder dry and to extinguish it if necessary.[52] [Illustration: Fig. 47. Method of Using the Strike-a-light. (Cat. No. 128405, U. S. N. M. Drawing by W. H. Burger.)] There comes in here appropriately a note of B. R. Ross on the burial customs of the Kutchin Indians of the eastern Athapascan stock. He says: They bury with the dead a flint fastened to a stick, a stone to strike it on (pyrites) to make fire, and a piece of the fungus that grows on the birch tree for tinder and some touch-wood also.[53] There is no mention of this process of fire-making by the older writers on Greenland, Cranz and Egede, though they carefully note and describe the plan by wood-boring. Later explorers going higher north in western Greenland have found it. Dr. Emil Bessels, writing about the Itah Eskimo of Smith Sound, says: The catkins of the arctic willow are used as tinder to catch the sparks which have been produced through the grinding of two pieces of stone.[54] Dr. E. K. Kane gives a more complete account from nearly the same locality, the Arctic Highlands of northwest Greenland. He says that the Eskimo of Anoatok struck fire from two stones, one a plain piece of angular milky quartz, held in the right hand, the other apparently an oxide of iron [pyrites or iron ore?] They were struck together after the true tinder-box fashion, throwing a scanty supply of sparks on a tinder composed of the silky down of the willow catkins (_Salix lanata_) which he held on a lump of dried moss.[55] Very much farther west on Melville Peninsula Parry gives a complete and interesting description of the primitive way. This account gives us a link between the western and eastern Eskimo. He writes: