By February 1, 1879, the few Inuits at Camp Daly had moved over to Depot island, it being more available for walrus hunting in the ice-flow, which season was then just commencing. For the first time among these savage sons of old Boreas I was brought in contact with one of their superstitions that caused me no little annoyance. When the reindeer hunting season is over the walrus and seal come into the Esquimaux market, completely excluding the reindeer, which from that date becomes forbidden fruit. The Inuit who has relinquished reindeer meat tears down his old igloo and builds a new one, as he must not hunt or eat walrus or seal or work on sealskin clothing in an igloo where the now discarded deer has been eaten or clothing made from his hide. 

Now I found it impossible to procure any reindeer meat for self or for dog-feed while I lived in my present igloo. If I would only build another, which they beseeched me to do, even on the site of the present one, they would bring me plenty. Natives came over daily but brought no meat and we finally had to take the dogs over to Depot Island, where the natives allowed them to be fed. 

This superstition is founded on the belief that there exists two Gods antagonistic to each other, one ruling the seas and all in them, and the other the land with all its beasts and birds, and they must appease their respective divine jealousies by holding true allegiance to only one at a time. 

The Diomeders are known for belligerence and reckless daring and have been called "the Vikings of the Arctic Sea," " a reputation they rather cherish. One day, two boat crews were in the Alaskan mainland village of Wales and saw a film about Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde, with violence and pillage aplenty. Back on Little Diomede, they were asked by a visiting biologist how they had liked the film. One man grinned and said: "Nothing special. Just a bunch of Diomeders on horseback!" 

The walrus hunters in my boat slept soundly, oblivious to the storm. Slowly the wind abated, the sky cleared, the pack spread out, the morning was pure magic. We launched the boat and purred smoothly along dark lanes among the floes, through a fantasy-land of shimmering, wind-and-wave sculptured ice. The ice glowed in the soft opalescence of morning, in delicate lilac, rose, and cool green, and bone-white icicles hung in grottoes of the deepest blue. Thousands of murres and auklets, like dark toy birds, lay scattered upon the satin sea. 

Far in the pack we heard the walruses, drifting north upon the Aloes from the Bering to the Chukchi Sea, all 200,000 funneling through Bering Strait on their annual spring migration. We approached them slowly, cautiously. Masses of madder-brown walruses lay sound asleep in chummy heaps upon brown, dung- smeared floes. 

Tom throttled the motor back, the men readied rifles and harpoons. They spoke in whispers; excitement and tension filled the boat. We drifted close to a pan loaded with sleeping animals, and suddenly, upon a low command from Tom, the eleven hunters fired, and fired again and again, a rapid, deadly fusillade. One moment it had been very quiet and then came carnage and chaos. 

Dead walruses lay on the floe, fountains of blood spurting and bubbling from the wounds. Others, in fear and fury, poured off the floe like a brown avalanche, rallied and attacked the boat, bellowing with rage, their eyes bloodshot. The men shot onto the water, into the walruses at top speed; most walruses turned and fled. A huge bull, bleeding from many wounds, dived, then shot up and hacked into the boat, and water rushed in through the gash. The hunters were prepared. They stuffed a large piece of blubber into the hole to staunch the leak. Ice and water were red with blood. They shot and killed the wounded walruses and tried to harpoon them before they sank. 

Ten walruses were dead. The men pulled the umiak onto the floe, patched the hole, and with amazing speed and precision cut up the 2-ton (1.8-tonne) carcasses. Blood flowed everywhere; piles of steaming guts lay on the ice; men with axes cut heavy-boned skulls to remove the precious ivory tusks. Ivory and a sea of blood; it seemed the essence of the hunt. We loaded the boat to the gunwales with meat, fat, and ivory, and headed for Diomede. The weather was changing fast. Ragged storm clouds raced across the sky. Gray fog oozed over sea and ice and enwrapped us like a clammy shroud. The wind increased; the heavily laden boat pitched and lurched in the rising waves. They raised the yard-broad waistcloth, furled against the gunwales in calm seas, on paddles and poles around the boat and lashed it securely as a guard against the wind-whipped spray. 

The day dragged on toward a dark and evil night. One man stood in the bow to watch for the ice floes that surged suddenly out of the murk and spume and vanished again into the dark-gray void that surrounded us. Tommy and I sat on the food box, lolling against each other with the wildly yawing motion of the boat, shivering and chilled to the core. Toward midnight, when the storm was at its peak, flinging sheets of spray across the waistcloth, and icy water soaked us to the skin, one of the men crept toward us, from thwart to thwart like a huge dark crab, took off his great parka, wrapped it tightly around the boy, gave us an encouraging grin, and crawled back to his seat, now dressed only in shirt and pullover. 

We reached Diomede in the morning and unloaded the boat. I walked slowly up to my shack, made tea and drank it very hot, and fell exhausted on my cot, blood-spattered and reeking of blood and blubber. Two hours later, Tom banged on my shack, I put on my sea-soaked parka, and we were off again. 

Days and nights merged. We hunted in fair weather and in foul (mostly foul, Bering Strait is notorious for its storms and fogs). The great racks on Diomede were loaded with drying meat; the ancient meat holes, the deep freezers of Diomede, were crammed with walrus meat and fat. The women worked nearly as hard as the men. Mary, Tom's wife, split walrus skins to be used as umiak covers with her razor-sharp ulu. Their daughter, Eva, eighteen years old and just back from a mainland high school, cut blubber off the walrus skins, and sliced meat and hauled it to the meat holes. Her sister, Etta, a charming, round-faced three-year-old, sat on a rock and copied her mother, Mary, pretending to split a piece of walrus skin with a can lid in lieu of an ulu. 

Suddenly, near the end of June, the hunt was over. The last walruses had passed to the north. The four Diomede umiaks had brought back much of the meat and all the ivory of 700 walruses ample food and relative prosperity, though much of that would be spent on liquor. The men caught auklets with long-handled nets, just as the Polar Inuit catch dovekies. I went with Albert Iyahuk to collect greens on the mountainside; he showed me the many roots, corms, and leaves Diomeders preserve in seal oil and eat with meat. 

Tom left to work on the pipeline in northern Alaska. Other men followed, some to the pipeline, some to Anchorage or to "the lower forty-eight." Most went to jobs, some went to jails, usually for brawling in bars. "I spend so much time in the Nome jail, I use it as my home address," one man joked. The Diomeders love to travel, but in fall all flock back to their lonely rock set in an icy sea. 

John lyapana was going with his umiak to the mainland and offered to take me along. Once, in a drunken rage at "whites," he had threatened to kill me. Two days later, sober, he asked me over for supper and was a delightful host, generous, amiable, with an enormous fund of stories about olden times on Diomede. Many villagers were on the beach when we pushed off. "Come back," they called, "come back and bring your family."

FISHING, CLAMMING, CRABBING 

It is almost as though the Inuit in former days were following God's injunction to Noah that "every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you," and caught, killed, and ate anything, from 2-ounce (56-g) lemmings to 60-ton (54-tonne) bowhead whales. 

By far the most important animals to them, however, were seals and caribou, the sine qua non of their life in the Arctic. Had God created the world with only these two animals, the Inuit would have been content, for seals and caribou supplied them with most of their food and clothing. 

Some groups specialized: the people of Little Diomede Island in Bering Strait are primarily walrus hunters. The Inuit of the Mackenzie Delta region hunted white whales, and still do. The inland Inuit had no seals; they lived mainly on caribou and fish, and obtained durable sealskins (for boot soles) and seal oil (for their stone lamps) in trade from coastal people. 

There were no caribou in a few Arctic regions. They died out on the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay in the 1880s when an abnormal winter rain was followed by heavy frost and the islands were covered with a hard, glittering carapace of ice. The caribou could not dig through it for food, and all starved to death. Deprived of caribou pelts for winter clothing, the ingenious Inuit made them from cider-duck skins. A mirvin, an eider-duck parka, was as warm as a caribou parka, but not as lasting. 

In addition to vital seal and caribou, nearly all Inuit caught fish, from small, bony sculpins to huge Greenland sharks, whose toxic meat could be eaten only by people who knew how to prepare it. The Inuit had nets: in the Bering Sea region they used large nets of seal or walrus thong to capture seals, and even whales. In Greenland, the English explorer John Davis saw in 1586 nets made of baleen: "They (the Inuit] make nets to take their fish of the finne of the whale." (Siberia's Chukchi, close neighbors of the Inuit, wove their nets of nettle fibers.) The most common way, though, to capture fish was with hook and line, or with leisters. 

The most important, most delicious fish was char, once infinitely numerous in lakes and rivers and the sea. Unlike its close cousin, the salmon, the char does not jump. Taking advantage of this, Inuit built sapotit across rivers, often in rocky rapids, with an entrance sluice leading to a central, rock-surrounded basin. Once the basin was swarming with ascending fish, the Inuit closed the low stone weir, jumped into the icy water, and speared the char with three- pronged leisters. It was numbingly cold, but wildly exciting: the women screaming on shore, the children jumping on the rocks, and then great feasts of fish, and rocks covered with blood-red split char, drying for the coming winter. 

Octave Sivanertok of Repulse Bay, on the northwest coast of Hudson Bay, took me along in spring to fish for char and lake trout. He drove his powerful snowmobile with speed and consummate skill. The long sled, pulled by ropes, rattled and hammered over rock-hard snow and ice ridges, and often slewed wildly. I got a merciless pounding and had to hang on like a limpet to avoid being tossed off when the sled caromed off ice blocks. With the snowmobile, Arctic travel gained in speed but lost most of its romance and comfort. Traveling by dog team, leisurely and silent, was usually a pleasure. One was aware of land and frozen sea, and felt as one with it. But it was slow. Octave covered in hours what would have taken days with a dog team. 

We stopped for the night near a frozen lake. Octave built an igloo, wind-proof and much warmer than a tent. He chiseled a hole through the 6-foot (2-m)-thick ice of the lake, built a windbreak of snow blocks, and jigged for lake trout. I went for a long walk to relax my battered bottom. When I returned, the last rays of the setting sun slanted across land and lake and flecked the snow with nacre and gold. Octave, endlessly patient, still jigged for trout. A row of speckled, bronze-glistening fish lay near him. 

Next day we crossed Tesserssuaq, the big lake, and finally came to Sapotit Lake, really a series of lakes connected by shallow, fast- flowing rivers. Dark water welled up and poured in milky-turquoise streamers across the ice. Here, in summers long ago, men caught char at sapotit. Many of the ancient stone weirs still existed, but were breached to let the migrating fish pass. Now many Inuit had come, like us, from Repulse Bay to spear fish with leisters. They kneeled at the edge of the ice, jigged metal lures with metronome regularity (in former days the lures were of carved ivory or polished bone), held leisters poised, and peered intently into the crystal-clear water for the golden flash of trout or the silver and rose of char. A lightning thrust, and the fish, held firmly by the leister prongs, was pulled onto the ice. Some leisters were still made of musk-ox horn, the best traditional material, strong and flexible. New leister tines were carved from the strong, thick plastic used for the counters of butcher shops. Sapotit and leisters are among mankind's oldest inventions. Magdalenian hunters used them 30,000 years ago during the final Paleolithic culture in western Europe. 

Clams, where available, are a favorite food for Inuit. Some come already collected and even a bit predigested. At Little Diomede Island in Bering Strait, walrus hunters took 50 pounds (22.5 kg) and more of recently shucked clams from the stomach of each walrus they killed. Masses of these clams were eaten fresh, raw or cooked, and more were slipped onto strings and air-dried for future use. In 1975, when I first lived on Little Diomede, I tried to improve on this by making clam chowder and invited Inuit friends to my shack for supper. But the clams, soaked in walrus gastric juices, curdled the milk, and the chowder, like nearly all my cooking, was a disaster. When I returned fifteen years later to live again on Little Diomede, it was still remembered. "Have you come back to make more chowder?" someone asked. 

At Aberdeen Bay on the north shore of Hudson Strait, which the Inuit call Taksertoot, the place of fogs, we had to dig our own clams. Inuit from the settlements of Lake Harbour and Cape Dorset also gather at this remote bay to quarry with pickaxes, chisels, sledgehammers, and crowbars the distinctive jade-green soapstone for which their superb carvings are famous. 

Hunting in Inuit society is man's work. Both men and women fish. But clam digging, berry picking, and egg collecting are usually family affairs, and Inuit often make it into a joyous outing. Matthew Kellypallik of Cape Dorset saw me on the beach and called: "You want to come along?" (I had dropped broad hints in camp that I wanted to go on a clamming trip), and we were off, a large canoe full of happy people, two pet dogs, and lots of zinc and plastic pails. We drove to a far bay and, as the tide (here more than 30 feet [9 m] high) receded, walked out onto the great mud flats and dug for clams with spoons, forks, knives, or sticks, most soon bent or broken. Some clams were huge - hand-long and perhaps forty or fifty years old. There are few walruses on this coast, and humans rarely visit; most clams can grow and age in peace. An earnest little boy, shy but keen to teach, took me in tow and showed me the telltale bubbles of retracting siphons and how to dig out the clams. Before the tide returned our pails were full, and a huge pot of clams was boiling on the pressure stove. We returned late in the evening, mud-smeared, full of clams and pleasantly tired. On the broad camping beach, a dozen tents, lit by pressure lamps, glowed yellow in the deep-blue dusk. 

We passed an elegant cabin cruiser. Its owner, a world-famous Inuk carver, leaned over the railing and recognized me. ' "Killiktee [an old Inuk at whose camp I had lived for several months] says Hallo!' " he called. "He says you eat our food just like an Inuk. Come eat with us tomorrow. We shot some seals. We ate in the main cabin of the cruiser, paneled in warm mahogany, the brass fittings shining, the deep-pile carpet burgundy red. The Inuit spread cut cardboard boxes on the carpet and upon them laid the seal, our supper. The host slit it open from throat to hind flippers, and we ate it, kneeling around the carcass and observing the ancient, traditional meat division of this region: the women ate the heart, the men the liver, the women took ribs and meat from the ventral region, men vertebrae and the dorsal meat, eating the lean, dark, blood-rich meat together with snippets of blubber. We washed our hands, drank lots of very sweet tea, and talked of hunting and carving. Big chunks of soapstone, my host explained, are called "bank stones.' "Why?" I asked. He laughed: "Because only banks can afford to pay for the large carvings made from them."

 In a few places in Alaska, Inuit not only catch a lot of fish, but also capture crabs by a simple yet ingenious method. At Little Diomede Island in late winter and spring, women, children, and some men spend patient hours "crabbing" at holes chiseled through the ice, catching crabs that measure, including spindly legs, about 2 feet (60 cm) in diameter (northern cousins of the famous king crabs). A stone sinker and two chunks of fish as bait are lowered on a thin line to the sea bottom. A feeding crab, loath to lose food, hangs on as it is pulled gently upward. Only when it is nearly at the surface does the crab seem nervous and loosen its grip, but that hesitation is fatal: the fisherman gaffs it or grabs it and throws it on the ice. The most patient crabbers caught twenty or thirty crabs in a day, enough for several delicious meals, and carried them home in burlap bags. 

Sculpins, say the Little Diomeders, are attracted by anything red. In former days, the bait was the bright orange-red skin flap near the base of the bill of crested auklets, small seabirds which the islanders scooped out of the air with long-handled nets. Now they use bits of red plastic as sculpin bait, or chips of ivory tinted red with Mercurochrome. 

Some fish catches are wholly fortuitous. Masautsiaq Eipe, Sofie Arnapalãq, their grandson, and I were on our way from Qaanaaq, main village of Greenland's Polar Inuit, to the floe edge 60 miles (96 km) away to hunt seals and whales. A lead, sealed by new- formed ice and covered with snow, stopped us. Masautsiaq tested the ice with a steel-tipped pole; when the ice broke, he called out in happy surprise. The lead was filled with dead Greenland halibut, flat, flounder-like, clay-colored fish, 2 feet (60 cm) long and delicious when fresh. The Inuit used to catch them with long lines made of bowhead-whale baleen and catch them now with nylon lines armed with many hooks. Most fish in the lead had been swept there by currents and were far from fresh. The best ones were for us, the rest were excellent dog food. Huskies are not fussy. Masautsiaq, prepared for most eventualities, carried several large sealskins and a huge sheet of plastic on his sled. With these he now fashioned a boat-shaped container on the sled, we filled it with fish, covered the slippery load - perhaps 600 pounds (270 kg) - with more sealskins, piled our bed robes and possessions on top, lashed all securely with thong, and, perched high on the sled and now amply provided with food for us and the dogs, traveled on to the floe edge.

In 1967, I lived some months at Coral Harbour on Southampton Island in northern Hudson Bay and often traveled with Tommy Nakoolak, then, at sixty-two, patriarch of the island's sizable Nakoolak clan. Of Knud Rasmussen, the great Danish ethnologist, it was said that he was the only man known who collected old women. They, of course, were the repositories of the ancient tales he loved and recorded. Similarly, whenever possible, I lived and traveled with older Inuit who told and taught me many things the lore, the legends, the skills of their people. 

Tommy Nakoolak was small and wiry, kind and considerate, and he owned a Peterhead boat, the Tereglu (the word for a baby bearded seal), which he handled as if it were a racing yawl. One day along Coats Island, south of Southampton Island, he spotted a herd of walruses on a rocky promontory. "You want pictures?" he asked, and when I said yes, he swung the boat around and headed full speed for the rocks. He sheered past them so closely, I tensed instinctively for the coming crash, but Tommy only smiled. Like many old-time Inuit, he had an astounding geographical memory and knew every rock and ridge along hundreds of miles of coast. 

One day while his sons were hunting caribou on Coats Island, Tommy said: "Come, I'll show you something." He took the Tereglu to a secluded bay near Cape Pembroke. Ashore were ancient stone houses, man-high cairns, box-like graves built of large flat stones, and everywhere masses of bleached bones of caribou, walrus, bowhead whale, and seal. "This is where the Sadlermiut lived," said Tommy. A mysterious, long-isolated Stone Age people, the Sadlermiut were briefly known to the outside world and then all were killed by a whaler-brought disease in the winter of 1902. They may even have been Tunit, the powerful Dorset-culture people. Extinct everywhere else for 800 years, they had found a final refuge on these isolated islands. (The people who now live on Southampton Island are descendants of mainland Inuit brought by whalers and traders to the island to replace the extinct Sadlermiut.) 

The Sadlermiut were "discovered" in the summer of 1824 by the explorer Captain G.F. Lyon of the Royal Navy. He anchored his ship, HMS Griper, off Cape Pembroke. From the camp which Tommy Nakoolak was showing me, a man approached the Griper, riding on a most peculiar craft. It consisted of "three inflated seal- skins, connected most ingeniously by blown intestines, so that his vessel was extremely buoyant." The man's legs dangled in the water while he propelled this strange float toward the ship with a narrow- bladed paddle made of whale bone. The poor man had never seen other humans before and he was afraid: "his teeth chattered and himself and seal-skins trembled in unison. 

Lyon went ashore. The people were shy but friendly, of "mild manners, quiet speech, and as grateful for kindness, as they were anxious to return it." The men wore pants of polar-bear fur; their mittens were the skins of murres, feathers inside. The women were slightly tattooed, and "their hair was twisted into a short club, which hung over each temple." The men's topknots were even more impressive: "Each man had an immense mass of hair as large as the head of a child, rolled into the form of a ball, and projecting from the rise of the forehead." 

Once the Sadlermiut had been numerous. At Native Point on Southampton Island, the archaeologist Henry B. Collins of the Smithsonian Institution found, in 1954, "the largest aggregation of old Eskimo house ruins in the Canadian Arctic." But whalers began to stop at the islands and contact with another world was fatal to the long-isolated people. When the whaling captain George Comer visited Southampton Island in 1896, only seventy Sadlermiut were left. Comer admired the strength and courage of these "fearless people" who had only stone-tipped harpoons and spears: "For an Eskimo in his frail kayak to attempt to capture a [50-ton/ 45-tonne] whale with the primitive implements which they manufactured meant great courage. 

In the fall of 1902, the whaler Active stopped at Southampton Island. One sailor was sick; he may have had typhus or typhoid. Sadlermiut visited the ship and took the disease back to their village. That winter the last Sadlermiut died in lonely agony upon their island. Collins studied their house ruins and graves in 1954 and 1955 and "found evidence that the Sadlermiut descended from the Dorsets - that they were in fact the last survivors of the Dorset culture."

Page 369:

During the winter of 1866-7, and following summer, Captain Libby, of our Telegraph Service, with nearly forty men, stopped at this inaccessible place. At Grantley Harbour, a good titation, and other houses (which have been left there), and portions of the telegraph line, were built by these men. It was, as before stated, the spot intended for the Bering Strait cable “landing” on the American side, and it has been already mentioned as the central point at which the natives of Kotsebue and Norton Sounds, and the neighbouring country, meet the Tchuktchis from the Siberian coast. Many whalers annually visit this harbour for trading purposes, and I expect to hear of a permanent white settlement being formed there. The experience of the earlier Arctic explorers, as of our telegraph men, shows that it is a good spot to winter in. Some of our men there, at one time very short of provisions, lived for months at an Indian village near Cape Prince of Wales. Supplies from the resources of the country were very uncertain. In 1866-7, the natives in the neighbourhood were almost starving, and were at one time reduced to boiling down their old boots and fragments of hide, in order to sustain life. “ Yet,” said a correspondent (a member of our expedition), writing from thence, “ the party under Captain Libby although without bread or flour for some weeks, escaped the scurvy entirely. The generally received opinion that scurvy is generated from want of flour, does not seem to be correct. At the station (Fort St. Michaers), where plenty of flour was received, and freely used, they wore afflicted with this disease; while at Port Clarence, where they were almost entirely dependent upon the resources of the country for some weeks, living upon walrus and seal meat, without flour or bread, no symptom of scurvy made its appearance.”

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https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.37317/page/n293/mode/2up?q=Scurvy 

Some few of the workmen had suffered from frost-bite and scurvy. A propos of the latter terrible scourge, it is to be remarked, that our men at Port Clarence, the worst fed of all our parties, who had lived for a long time on a native diet of walrus and seal blubber, had not suffered from it at all, while those in Norton Sound, who got a fair amount of flour, &c., from the Russian posts, suffered severely from the disease.