Now that the Eskimos had guns, hunting was easier, but they had to
do more of it. They killed animals for their own use, and they did
extra hunting because they needed furs to trade with the white men for
bullets and guns and new things to make their homes more comfortable.
[Illustration: Hunters drove caribou into lakes where it was easy to
shoot them from kayaks.]
[Illustration: This kind of house was called an igloo, just as snow
houses were.]
NEW WAYS AND OLD
Hilltop and Driftwood lived in a house made of logs covered with sod.
The sod was grass, dug up with the earth around the roots when the
ground wasn't frozen. It helped to keep the houses warm.
Look at the picture and you will see how different this log cabin was
from the ones you know about. The walls sloped inward, instead of going
straight up. This was important for two reasons. First, piling chunks
of sod was easier against sloping walls than against straight ones.
Second, the slanting walls made less space at the top. That meant less
air to heat than in a squared-off house.
[Illustration: Eskimos played string games like cat's cradle. This one
is a deer.]
A log house was very warm. In fact, Hilltop and Driftwood felt
uncomfortably hot when dinner was being cooked on old-time lamps or
over a new-fangled iron stove.
The grownups took off most of their clothes indoors, and the children
didn't wear anything. Everybody sweat a great deal. This is how they
wiped themselves dry: When the men sat around the house at night,
they often spent their time whittling pieces of wood into toys or
ornaments or tools. The shavings they made were very small and fine,
like excelsior. Piles of the shavings were always heaped up at the side
of the room. When anyone got sweaty, he wiped himself dry with the
excelsior and threw it away. He used his towel only once, so it never
got dirty.
THEY DIDN'T GET LOST
[Illustration: Dogs sometimes pulled umiaks on sleds.]
In winter, Hilltop and Driftwood often went traveling with their
parents. Riding on sleds, they visited other villages, and sometimes
they built snow houses, just as Papik and Milak had done. But their
sleds were a little different, and the dogs were not harnessed in the
same way. Instead of hitching each dog separately to the sled, Hilltop
tied them all to one line and they all pulled together in single file.
[Illustration]
Eskimo dogs were tough and strong. Each one knew his own name and the
names of all the others in his team. A dog usually hated to leave his
team if he was sold. Sometimes he would run away from his new master
and travel as much as sixty miles to get back home. Eskimos took good
care of their fierce, hard-working dogs, although they weren't gentle
with them. To train them and make them obey, Eskimos used whips. But
they had to be careful. Too much punishment made a dog refuse to work
at all. If their dogs hadn't worked and helped them travel, Eskimos
couldn't have found enough food.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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