When an Eskimo wife has finished making her spouse a pair of waterproof boots, she hands them to him, and he blows them up.  If there is one little pin-hole and the air oozes out, he throws the boots back to her, and she may take up the pedal gauntlet in one of two ways.  Either she must meekly start to make a new pair of boots without murmuring a word, or leave it open to him to take to his bosom another conjugal bootmaker.  We noticed with interest in watching this little tableau that there was no recrimination.  No word was spoken on either side, the exacting husband contenting himself with blowing up the boots and not the wife.

With uncanny fascination we watched one old woman curry a sealskin.  Her tongue was kept busy cleaning the scraper, while her mouth was a repository for the scrapings, which went first there, then to a wooden dish, then to the waiting circle of pop-eyed dogs.  The whole performance was executed with a precision of movement that held us fascinated.

If a white woman were to be shipwrecked and thrown upon an Eskimo foreshore and presenting herself at a Husky employment bureau, many surprises would await her.  Instead of asking for references from her last employer, the genial proprietor would first ask to inspect her teeth.  In prosecuting female Eskimo handicraft your teeth are as important a factor as your hands.  The reporter for the funeral column of an Eskimo daily, writing the obituary of a good wife, instead of speaking of the tired hands seamed by labor for her husband and little ones, would call pathetic attention to, “the tired and patient teeth worn to their sockets by the yearly chewing for the household.”  A young wife’s cobbling duty does not end with making for her mate boots that shall be utterly waterproof, but each morning she must arise before the seagull and chew these into shape.  You see, after the boots are wet each day they get as stiff as boards, then they must be lubricated with oil and chewed into shape.  We watched Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger at this wifely duty.  Taking the big boot up in her well-shaped hands, incisively, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, the white teeth made their way round the borderland between upper and sole, the indentations looking like the crisped edges on the rims of the pies your mother used to make.  Solomon’s eulogy of Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak corrected to the latitude of 70 deg.  North would read, “She seeketh fish and the liver of seals and worketh willingly with her hands; she riseth also while it is yet night and cheweth the boots of her household.”

Every bit of Eskimo skin-clothing is as soft and pliable as a kid glove.  The effect is not produced without patient labor, and again the teeth of the woman are brought into requisition.  The raw sealskins or hides of the reindeer and bear are staked out in the sun with the skin-side up and dried thoroughly.  Before this stiff material can be worked up into garments it must be made pliable, and this is done by systematically chewing the fibres, a slow and painstaking task.  Creasing the hide along its whole length, the women take it in their hands and chew their way along the bend from one end of the skin to the other, working their way back along the next half-inch line.  Watching them, one is reminded of the ploughman driving his team afield up one furrow and down the other.