The boys have a sort of duel which they have copied from their elders.  It is customary for the grown men of the tribe to settle accumulated difficulties by standing a selected number of contestants, say four on each side, facing each other.  Each man is allowed to strike his adversary a number of blows, the recipient of the buffeting being bound by the laws of the game to stand quiescent and take what is coming to him.  Then striker and strikee change places and reverse the courtesy.  All sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a row of “heathen” Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind, for the blows are no child’s play.  Think of what this self-inflicted discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball diamonds, and “sport” carnivals, and then do some more thinking.  A line of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and out among the camps of the Eskimo,—­“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control.”

[Illustration:  Farthest North Football]

What of the little girls?  They have dolls made of reindeer skins, rude imitations of their elders.  And they play “house,” and “ladies,” and “visiting,” just as their cousins do on every shore of the Seven Seas; but no little Eskimo girl has ever yet had the pleasure of dressing up in her mother’s long dresses.

[Illustration:  Two Spectators at the Game]

When the ptarmigan gets dark in feather and the sun begins to return in spring after the long six months’ night, it is the pleased prerogative of the children to blow out the lamp in the snow-house.  All the time that the sun is travelling south, clever combinations of cat’s-cradle are played by the mothers and the children to entangle the sun in the meshes and so prevent its being entirely lost by continuing south and south and forgetting entirely to turn back to the land of the anxiously-waiting Eskimo.  The boys, by playing a cup-and-ball game, help, too, to hasten its return.  When the sun forgets you for six months, you become fearful lest you have lost his loving care forever.  The spring is an anxious time in more ways than one, for if there is any suffering from hunger it is felt now, when the winter supplies are finished and the new hunts not yet begun.  “I’ll eat my hat” is an empty threat in the south, but many an Eskimo kiddie has satisfied the gnawing pains of spring hunger by chewing his little skin boots.

At the Mackenzie delta last year, Roxi the Eskimo came in and told me this sad story.  Six weeks before, a party of Eskimo had left Baillie Island with dogs for Kopuk.  On their way they found a dead whale and cooked and ate of it; the next day they found another and again indulged.  After travelling twenty-five miles, the whole party was taken violently ill, and six adults and two children died, leaving only one little girl alive.  There for three days and four nights she remained, alone in the camp of the dead, until by the merest chance a young Eskimo, attending his line of traps from Toker Point, stumbled into the silent camp.