his stomach, as you lower your buckets into the well of English undefiled.  “Disgusting,” you say.  It’s all a matter of latitude.  Watching a roly-poly Innuit baby finding its stomach-level with plummet of seal-blubber sustains the interest of the grand-stand for a longer period than watching your child dallying with the dripping delights of an “all-day sucker.”  These little babies have the digestion of an ostrich and his omnivorous appetite.  Suckled at their mothers’ breasts until they are two or even three years old, when they are weaned they at once graduate into the bill-of-fare of the adult.  Walrus-hide is about as uncompromising as elephant-hide, and an inch thick.  You see little chaps of three and four struggling valiantly with this, nibbling at it with keen delight, as a puppy does on an old shoe, or your curled Fauntleroy on an imported apple.  The Eskimo mother has no green apples to contend with in her kindergarten and need never pour castor-oil upon the troubled waters.  Every day in the year her babies are crammed with marrow and grease, the oil of gladness and the fat of the land.

To many Eskimo the contents of the paunch of the reindeer is the only vegetable food they get, and this is eaten without salt, as all their food is eaten.  They crack the bones of any animal they kill to get the marrow, which is eaten on the spot, the broken bones being pulverised and boiled to make much-prized gelatine.  To his fish and flesh the Eskimo adds a bewildering plenitude of wildfowl.  Last spring, eighteen hundred geese and ducks were killed by Eskimo on Herschel Island sand-pit.  It is the paradise of pot-hunter and wing-shot.  Captain Ellis of the Karluk, with one Eskimo fellow-sportsman, got a bag of 1132 ducks, geese, and swans in three days’ shooting, to send to the wrecked whalers off Point Barrow, Alaska.

Who are these people, and whence came they?  Each little tribe is a book unread before, and full to the brim of fascination.  When they are confronted with the picture of an elephant in a current magazine, they are all excitement.  The book is carried eagerly to the old man sunning himself down in the anchored oomiak.  Animation, retrospection, agitation chase from his seamed face all traces of drowsiness. “We used to know it.”  “Our fathers have told us.”  “This land-whale with its tail in front once lived in the land of the Innuit.”  We are now the ones to become excited.  Intending merely to amuse these fellow-Canadians who had been kind to us, we stumble upon a story of intense interest.  “Where did your fathers see this animal?” we asked.  “Here, in this country.  In the ice his bones were hidden,” said the old man.  With this he relapsed into the torpor we had disturbed, and no further word did we elicit.