At an early age Mertuk came to know the living creatures which were the sources of food and the means of life. She could tell the seasonal time in which came and went the wild fowl, of their breeding and of their young. The haunts and habits of the swift-footed animals of the glacier-enclosed land were all known to her, as well as the favorite resorts of the monsters of the bordering icy ocean, which furnished the hides and bones, the sinew and ivory, without which there would be neither needles and thread for the igloo, nor lances and sledges for the hunter. It was a land of meat and flesh in which she lived, with no bread or vegetables, and the taste of sugar and of tea, the flavor of salt and of pepper, were absent from her food. She knew not books, matches, fire-arms, boats, stoves, crockery, nor cloth whether of cotton or fibre, of silk or wool. It was a land without wood, iron, medicines, or stimulants, and equally without government, schools, churches, hospitals, or even houses--unless one could so name the stone huts, the skin tents, or the transient snow igloos. Her mother early taught her all the kinds of women's work which could make her useful to her tribe or to her family, and without doubt instilled in her a sense of some of the feminine graces which have softened the harshness of the world in all climes and in every country throughout the ages. Here they were a part of the life of the stone age, which the Etahs had inherited untainted by the outside world. The daughter's supple fingers soon braided evenly and closely the sinews of the narwhal into the tense and needful bow-strings, for Shung-hu hunted reindeer with bow and arrows. Her strong hands tightly stretched the drying seal-skin, through which later her bone-needles and sinew-thread were so skilfully plied that the skin broke before the seams gave way. With deft action and with an unwonted taste she so shaped her bird-skin clothing and blue-fox hoods as to win praise for her garments from men and women alike. Her skill with the lamp soon became equal to that of the oldest expert of the tribe. Choosing and drying the long moss best suited for wicks, she applied a bit of walrus fat to the moss threads, and twisted them into a dense, even roll. While other lamps gave forth volumes of smoke, Mertuk so skilfully trimmed the lighted moss-wick that it gave an equal steady flame along the edge of the _koodlik_ (pot-stone lamp). An adept in all woman's work, always in health, gay, witty and even-tempered, Mertuk came also to be a comely maiden--well-formed in figure, fair of face, though very tiny in stature.