“By-o, Baby Bunting,
Daddy’s gone a-hunting,
To get a little rabbit-skin,
To wrap his Baby Bunting in.”

Mother-love is a platform upon which even ancestral enemies can meet.  While I sat cross-legged (and, like cotton, absorbent) last summer enjoying the hospitality of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, to us entered a beautiful-faced Loucheux Indian mother with a pair of twins pendant,—­rollicking chaps.  The younger Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak dropped on the floor her lord’s boot which she had been dutifully biting into shape and jumped up to greet her visitor.  There was no mistaking that smile of hospitality.  Snatching from the visitor one of her baby boys, the young hostess kissed and cried out to it with an abandon of maternal joy, the culminating point of which was feeding it from her own breast.  Thus, in one instance at least, has the ancient feud of Loucheux and Eskimo died.

A baby Eskimo is nursed until it is two years old or older, and learns to smoke and to walk about the same time.  The family pipe is laid upon the couch, and papa, mamma, and the children take a solacing whiff as the spirit moves them.  These pipes are identical with those used by the Chinese, and hold but half a thimbleful of tobacco, the smoke being inhaled and swallowed with dreamy joy.

The hardihood of Eskimo children is scarcely believable.  It is not unusual for children of six years to trudge uncomplainingly for twenty-five miles by the side of their elders; and we came to know a little seven-year old chap who was quite a duck-hunter, and who went out every day alone and seldom came back without at least two brace.  At eleven years, with his watertight boots, spear in hand, and coil of line on his back, he takes up the Innuit man’s burden, and does it with an air both determined and debonair.  If you ask a mother if she does not think this a somewhat tender age for her boy to essay to keep up with the men on the hunt, she merely smiles as she sews her waterproof seam, and says, “The First Innuits [Eskimo] did so.”

These fur-clad philosophers are perhaps seen at their best in their play, for there is always harmony in the crystal nursery of the North, as these little people have no bad names nor threatening terms in their vocabulary Yet the play is often very rough, and your Eskimo lad is no molly-coddle.  The writer watched five small boys playing football with a walrus-bladder among the roses on the edge of the Arctic.  The game was neither Rugby nor “Soccer,” but there seemed to be a good deal of tackling in it.  Four of them got the fifth one, who hugged the ball, down, and were sitting on him and digging their skin boots into the soft parts of his anatomy.  “You’re angry, now,” said a Major of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police who was looking on.  “No, sir,” said the under dog, with difficulty protruding his head, “I never get mad when I play.”