As our native friends were now getting sufficient fish to maintain them,
they required no further assistance from us at present. Their mode of
catching salmon is a very simple one. They build a barrier of stones
about 1½ or 2 feet high across a creek, some distance below high-water
mark. The salmon, which keep close to the shore at this season, are by
this means, during the ebb of the tide, cut off from the sea, and are
easily speared. About sixty were thus killed this day. The spear used is
usually made of two diverging pieces of musk-ox horn, from 4 to 5 inches
apart at the extremities; between these there is a prong of bone about 3
or 4 inches shorter than the outer ones. Each of the longer prongs is
furnished with a barb on its inner side, made of a bent nail or piece of
bone, which prevents the fish from escaping. The handle is 6 or 8 feet
long. The head of the instrument much resembles a three-pronged fork,
with the middle prong a little shorter than the others.
The moon was full this day. High-water at 45 minutes past noon. Arkshuk,
Shimakuk, and Kei-ik-too-oo visited us on the 28th, bringing a few pairs
of boots for sale. The tins which contained preserved meat, and table
knives and forks, were in great demand among these good folks. One of
the ladies to whom I gave a fork, used it as neatly in eating fish as if
she had been accustomed to it from childhood. Thermometer as high as
+60° in the shade.
The ice in the bay had broken up for more than a mile from the shore
opposite the mouth of the river, but some distance out it looked as
white and firm as ever.
I had for some time observed that large stones, some of them of one or
two tons weight, were making their appearance on the ice; and I was much
puzzled to make out how they came there. They could not have fallen from
the shore, as the beach was sloping at the place, nor had they been
carried in by drift ice of the previous season. The only way that I
could account for it was this. At the commencement of winter the ice
layer acquiring considerable thickness, had become frozen to the stones
lying on the bottom, and raised them up when the tide came in. The
stones would get gradually enclosed in the ice as it grew thicker by
repeated freezings, whilst by the process of evaporation, which goes on
very rapidly in the spring, the upper surface was continually wasting
away, so that in June and July there was little of the first formed ice
remaining, and thus the stones which at first were on the under surface
of the ice appeared on the top. This may perhaps in some measure account
for boulders, sand, shells, &c. being sometimes found where geologists
fancy they ought not to be. Ice has been time out of mind the great
"conveyancer."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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