But we do not live on seal alone in the North, for there is a bewildering bill-of-fare.  Reindeer have a parasite living on the back between the skin and the flesh, a mellifluous maggot an inch long.  Raw or cooked it is a great delicacy, and if you shut your eyes it tastes like a sweet shrimp.  Don’t be disgusted.  If you have scooped shrimps from their native heath, you have discovered the shrimp, too, to be a parasite.

Another Arctic titbit is that fleshy cushion of the jaw of the whale which in life holds the baleen.  What is whale-gum like?  It tastes like chestnuts, looks like cocoa-nut, and cuts like old cheese.  Whale-blubber tastes like raw bacon and it cannot very easily be cooked, as it would liquify too soon.  It is a good deal better than seal-oil, which to a southern palate is sweet, mawkish, and sickly.  Seal-oil tastes as lamp-oil smells.  But you can approach without a qualm boiled beluga-skin, which is the skin of the white whale.  In its soft and gelatinous form it ranks among northern delicacies with beaver-tail and moose-nose, being exceedingly tasty and ever so much more palatable than pigs-feet.

Musquash in the spring is said to be tender and toothsome, but that overpowering smell of musk proved too much for our determination.  You may break, you may shatter the rat if you will, but the scent of the musk-rose will cling to it still.  There is a limit to every one’s scientific research, and, personally, until insistent hunger gnaws at my vitals and starvation looms round the edge of the next iceberg, I draw the line at muskrat and am not ashamed to say so.  Compelling is the association of ideas, and the thought grips one that muskrat must taste as domestic rats (are rats domestic?) look.  Raw fish at the first blush does not sound palatable, yet raw oysters appeal.  The truth is that meat or fish frozen is eaten raw without any distaste, the freezing exerting on the tissues a metabolic change similar to that effected by cooking; and it is convincingly true that bad fish is ever so much better frozen than cooked.

Blubber is not a staple, as is so often misstated, but it is a much esteemed delicacy.  During the summer months the Eskimo has to provide light and fuel for that long half-year of darkness within the igloo.  The blubber obtained in summer is carefully rendered down and stored in sealskin bags—­the winter provision of gas-tank, electric storage-battery, coal-cellar, and wood-pile.  In using oil for fuel, this master artificer of the North has anticipated by decades, if not centuries, the inventive adaptability of his “civilised” cousins.  The blubber appears in a blanket between the skin of the animal and its flesh, and when it is spared for food, is cut into delicious strings, an inch wide, an inch deep, and the longer the better.  Give a Fur-Land kiddie a strip of this sweetmeat and he grins like that Cheshire cat he has never seen.  He doesn’t eat it, but drops it into the cavernous recesses of