Carnivore Diet

Dr. Anderson accordingly set out December 27th for the Baillie Islands with two sleds and accompanied by Palaiyak, Tannaumirk, and Pannigabluk, the last named of whom had made up her mind to sever her connection with our party. They went by way of Langton Bay to pick up provisions for the journey, for we had there considerable quantities of flour and other “civilized” foods which we had bought from the Teddy Bear. We made it a principle to live on the country when we were anywhere else than at Langton Bay, and to live at Langton Bay on the stores we had purchased and which we kept there, for indeed there was nothing else to live on at the place except the whale which had now been two years dead (thawed two summers and frozen two winters), and was therefore not so palatable as it had been the year before. By this I do not mean to say that it was unfit for food. We did, as a matter of fact, cut up some of it to eat, and that by choice rather than through necessity. The Eskimo found it an agreeable change of diet from the fish, venison, and baking powder bread, and I found it not particularly distasteful, although I preferred the monotony of the venison to the change to rotten whale. 

While Dr. Anderson was gone we at the home camp altered in no way our ordinary habits of life. There was not much daylight for hunting, so Ilavinirk merely tended his traps and the fish nets. Tending fishnets is not, by the way, the most pleasant occupation imaginable in an Arctic January. The nets were set underneath the ice, which had now become about four feet thick, and it took considerable work with a pick every day to make a hole so that the net could be hauled out, and when it was hauled out the fish had to be disentangled from the meshes with the bare hands. Sticking your hands into ice water when the weather is something like 40° below zero, and especially if the wind is blowing, is as unpleasant a job as one can well undertake. We have to use the bare hands also in skinning the caribou which we kill in winter, but that is not nearly so serious a matter, for whenever your hands get cold you can warm them by sticking them inside the body of the animal you are cutting up. 

The fishing was gradually getting poorer and poorer. The outlet of the lake had frozen to the bottom early in the fall, so that we knew the fish were still in the lake, but somehow the three kinds other than the fresh-water cod seemed to get sleepy and sluggish towards midwinter and to cease swimming about. Possibly they were, in a way, hibernating in the deepest parts of the lake. The “ling” ( as I believe the fresh-water cod is called) seemed to get more active as winter advanced, so that while in the fall these cod had been no more than ten percent of the catch, by Christmas a single net would frequently contain a dozen cod and only three or four of the other kinds of fish. Finally towards the middle of January the ice had become so thick and the fish so few that I agreed with Ilavinirk in thinking it was scarcely worthwhile to continue. 

Of course it is only after having tried it that one can learn how best to do such a thing as to winter under the conditions which we had to face. During the few days while we were building our house in the fall we noticed that Back’s greyling were running down the creek past us in continuous streams day and night. Had we not been in such a hurry to build the house and had we put up a fish trap instead, we could have taken tens of thousands of fish at our very door; but when the house had been built and we turned our attention to the fishing, the run was already over. Had we to winter again in Coal Creek we could, on the basis of this knowledge, rely on putting up tons of fish in the few weeks immediately preceding the freeze up. It took us some time also to find the best fishing places in the lake. With plenty of nets, ranging from a 27-inch to a 5-inch mesh, a large quantity of food could be gotten together while the ice is thin the first few weeks after it forms, by setting the nets in the right places.

• Marmota caligata (Eschscholtz ). Hoary Marmot. Tjik'rik - pŭk, “ big marmot” (Alaskan Eskimo). Common in the Endicott Mountains north to the edge of the foot-hills. A few skins are taken by the inland Eskimo, and sold under the name of “ Badger.” Eskimo east of the Mackenzie say that the animal is not found in their country, but know the species by name, from garments brought in by western Eskimo. 

• Citellus parryi kennicotti (Ross). Mackenzie Spermophile. Tjik' rik (Alaskan Eskimo). Tsik -tsik (Mackenzie Eskimo). Common all along the northern coast of Alaska, in the Mackenzie delta, and east to Franklin Bay. Less common in the more rocky and stony country east of Franklin Bay. These Spermophiles are particularly abundant in sandy, alluvial river bottoms where the ground thaws earlier and to a greater depth, allowing the animals to dig their favorite roots and excavate their burrows more readily than on the frozen, moss - covered tundra. They feed principally upon the roots of various species of Polygonum, the “masū” roots of the Eskimo, and are very fat in the fall, and for a short time after coming out of winter quarter. The bulk of the Spermophiles go into hibernation in the latter part of September, but a few are occasionally seen until the middle of October. They come out again about the middle of April. The flesh is eaten by the Eskimo, and the skins make very good warm garments. The males fight viciously among themselves, and most of the old males are badly scarred from their numerous battles. 

• Citellus parryi (Richardson ). Hudson Bay Spermophile. Srik srik (Coronation Gulf Eskimo). Mr. E. A. Preble (N. A. Fauna, No. 27, p. 160) has conventionally placed the line between the habitats of C. parryi and of C. p. kenni cotti as the watershed between the Coppermine River and Great Bear Lake. The appearance and habits of the two varieties are similar, kennicotti being described as paler in color. The Spermophiles are very abundant in the sandy clay hills around the mouth of the Copper mine, and at various places along the south side of Coronation Gulf, and form a large part of the food of the Copper Eskimo in May and June, in the interim after they abandon sealing and leave their snow houses on the ice, and before they go inland for the summer Caribou hunt. We saw no evidence of the presence of Spermophiles on southern Victoria Island, and the Eskimo say that they are not found on the island. Citellus franklini (Sabine). Franklin's Spermophile. This species was not observed farther north than the Edmonton and Athabaska Landing trail. 

• Citellus tridecemlineatus (Mitchill). Thirteen - lined Spermophile. Number seen on the trail a few miles north of Edmonton, Al berta, but none farther north.

One of the greatest problems that presented itself in those early days of Okak Hospital was the problem of food. So often the people had said "We are Eskimos — we are different from Europeans" that I felt certain, that there was a great truth in it. The missionaries have done the people a good service in persuading them to remain Eskimos in their food and clothing: there has been no attempt to force European ways upon them; and I am convinced of the wisdom of this attitude because I have seen how the natives degenerate when they take to European food. They lose their natural coating of fat to a great extent, and need more clothing to withstand the cold; they become less robust, less able to endure fatigue, and their children are puny. 

Perhaps it is their great tendency to imitate that explains why, at the more southern of the stations, where English-speaking settlers live among the people at their vUlages, the Eskimos are not so fine physically as those living in the north. Whatever the reason, the fact remains: and so I tackled the feeding problem. When a sick man came to hospital I told his friends "You may bring Eskimo foods for him," and they hailed the suggestion with delight. I found them a little shy, at first, of letting me know what Eskimo foods really were. I knew from hearsay that seal meat and codfish are the staple things; and for a while the sick folks were supplied with those: but presently friends began quietly to bring other things —Eskimo dainties, I might call them. I went into a ward one day, and found a woman sitting up in bed sucking and chewing at a pile of raw fish-heads — which she hastily set aside when she saw me. Presently she took them up again and fell to with the remark, uttered with a shy smile, "Mammadlarput ukkoa (these taste very good)." Another had a lot of what looked like dried dates, threaded on a string. This curious collection looked very like a necklace, and she kept it by her bedside, and picked one of the objects off to chew whenever the fancy seized her. They puzzled me for a time, until Juliana (who had made my skin clothes, and had now become our first Eskimo nurse) enlightened me. "These are trout-stomachs, dried in the open air"— a real Eskimo tit-bit. 

I might make a long list of the foods the people brought — seal meat raw, dried, boiled, fried, and even made into a stew with flour and giving forth a most appetising smell; the flesh of reindeer, foxes, bears, hues, sea-birds of all sorts; eggs of gulls, sea-pigeons and ptarmigan, the gull's eggs especially being sometimes in a half-hatched state, with great, awful looking eyes inside them; trout and cod and salmon; the boiled skin of the white whale and the walrus; raw reindeer lips and ears — these are only some of the peculiarly Eskimo dishes that passed before our eyes; to say nothing of attempts at European cookery, such as home-baked bread, sometimes grey and sodden, sometimes light and wholesome, so that we wondered how Eskimo hands and Eskimo stoves could bake so well; roasted dough, as hard as bricks, a concoction of flour and water baked on the top of a tiny iron stove; and even, on festal occasions, dough with currants. 

The list might be longer: as a matter of fact, about the only food the people did not bring to hospital was their great delicacy — rotten seal-flippers. I made the acquaintance of this remarkable item on the Eskimo menu when I was visiting in one of the houses on the hill. The people were grouped round a wooden tub which contained a pile of grey and slimy somethings; the smell that arose from the tub was subtle and evil. 

"What have you got?'' I asked them; and the head man of the household answered with the Eskimo word for "rotten." He held a flipper up for me to see, and shook his head with a smile as he said "You could not eat that; it would make you ill."

"Ahaila," said another man in the circle, "only strong people can eat rotten flippers. No good for sick people. Illdle, but we like them, and they do us good, but the people in the south have forgotten how to eat rotten flippers, and their stomachs have grown too weak. Mammadlarpulle (but they taste good)." 

How long those flippers had been soaking in that tub I did not find out, but they were assuredly gamey. 

And the man spoke a truth; the northern Eskimos are far more primitive in their food than are the southerners; and yet, all along the coast, they still keep to the staple diet of raw meat that earned for them in olden times the epithet "Eskimo —eater of raw flesh" which, as the story goes, the Indians hurled at them in derision. And without a doubt the raw foods suit their peculiar constitution the best. 

I found that the people refuse food so long as they feel acutely ill: their one cry is "Immilanga, immilanga (water, water)." As a consequence they waste away at an extraordinary rate; and after a few days of serious illness the qumdam plump and ruddy Eskimo is gaunt and haggard, with bony face and wrinkled skin; he seems to have grown old all of a sudden. But with the beginning of convalescence the feeding begins. So soon as the invalid loses his pains and his feeling of misery his appetite returns, and he devours immense quantities of meat and fish, washing them down with copious draughts of water. This fattening process is even more wonderful to watch than the wasting: the hollow cheeks fill out, wrinkles disappear, limbs grow round and plump again, and the face locks younger day by day. All sorts of food are welcome, but without a doubt the native foods are the foods that work the miracle. I have seen the people sitting up in bed, munching strip after strip of tough dried codfish and leathery nipko (dried reindeer meat), and dipping the strips between the bites into a cup of cod-liver oil kept handy for the purpose. I suppose the oil moistened the meat ; at any rate it gave it a proper Eskimo flavour — but it must be proper Eskimo oil. I thought to save trouble by getting a gallon of the real thing from the oil yard ; but no, the sick folks wanted it fresh and home made, and I besought their friends to bring them some. It came, the crude article, brown and nauseous, the result of frying Uvers over the stove in the family frying-pan ; and it was like honey to their palate. They dipped and chewed, and sucked and chewed and dipped again, and said "Piovok'' (it is good), "Ananak" (splendid). And I wondered, as I watched them eat, whether it was that same all-useful frying-pan that gave the subtle and indescribable flavour to all home-made Eskimo foods, a flavour that the people seemed to miss in the native cookery done in our hospital kitchen.

 But, after all, the raw foods suit them best, and they know it. I went into one of the huts during my first week in Okak, to see a young woman who was just recovering from a serious illness. The spectacle that greeted me when I opened the door was enough to alarm the bravest: there sat the woman on her bed, a gaunt and white-faced spectre, with her breast bare, and blood dripping from her mouth. I thought some dire catastrophe had happened. "Whatever is the matter?" I said. 

For a moment she was silent: she was shy: then she said "My husband has brought me home akkigivik (a partridge)," and she lifted her hands to her mouth again, and tore with gusto at the raw, warm flesh of the bird. When once their shyness was overcome there was no difficulty about feeding; some native food or other was always in season, and people were always willing to bring a share of what they had. There was genuine sacrifice— sacrifice, I mean, with the right motive behind it — in those gifts of meat. Men used to come with dishes and pots, containing lumps of raw flesh or samples of native cookery, and hand them over with a shy smile and a laconic ''for the sick folks." And, incidentally, it was over a matter of food that my friend Paulus showed me that the people had really grasped the meaning of those bedsteads that had puzzled Veronica. He came one day dangling a leg of reindeer meat, and handed it to me with a little speech. "I know,'' he said, ''that nipko is very good for the sick folks. They like it, and it gives them nukke (sinews). Take this meat, and have it made into nipko. No, I will not take it home, because if I do the meat will be eaten up. Keep it here, and have it dried; then you will have some good nipko for next winter, to give to the sick people if there are any."

Eider Duck Hunt

William Kuptana: The first duck I got was from a small pond. It was shared by the elders as tradition called for. It is a custom to share your first kill with your elders. When the ducks come up in the spring, because of the lack of open water along the shore, they are found mostly on the mainland. This is where I got my first eider duck. Later, I was with a group of hunters. We came upon a large flock of eiders. They had alighted on the shore lead and were resting and feeding. As we approached, some flew away, while others dove into the water. We immediately advance as swiftly as possible before the ducks emerged from the water. I waited for the ducks to come up for air. As they came up, I was lucky enough to get one by using a bow and arrow. That was my second duck. It was so difficult to hunt ducks with bows and arrows in those days that if a person got at least three ducks, it was considered a large catch. 

Once spring arrived, Copper Inuit families spread out over a large area of the tundra, seeking fish and waterfowl. Although caribou were also beginning to return in both small and large herds, they were infrequently hunted in early summer due to leanness and the poor quality of their skins. Before the introduction of firearms, the number of ducks and geese harvested was probably quite small. Most food in the early summer came from fishing. In certain areas, such as Victoria Island, most fishing was done on inland lakes, where it was especially productive as the ice began to melt along the lakeshore. In other areas, mostly on the mainland, Copper Inuit had access to early summer runs of char which were intercepted at stone weirs built in streams and rivers. The Copper Inuit prepared dried lake-trout and char for use throughout summer and fall. 

Though times hare changed since the old days, and a man can sell his fish and blubber and fiirs at the store and buy flour and ship's biscuits and other plain things, the nature of the Eskimos has not changed. They still like to depend on the hunt for their daily food ; they still go out hungry in the morning, and gorge themselves on the raw flesh of the seals they bring home. This is their custom, part of their nature, born in them; they are a nation of hunters, and whatever changes in morals and housing and education passing years have seen among them, in tiiis one thing they do not change. And well it is that the Mission has been able to keep them true to their traditions in this matter, for to my mind there is no doubt at all that the life of a hunter is the ideal life for an Eskimo. It is the life for which he is especially gifted; the raw meat that he eats keeps him fit and well, and the exposure hardens him to bear the climate of his firozen land. And I do not base my belief on conjecture only; I base it upon what I have seen. At Okak, and in the north generally, the people are broad and plump, with flat faces and sunken noses; but further south I have seen lean, sharp-faced Eskimos, with bony limbs and pointed noses. They are pure-blooded Eskimos, all of them ; they may be lean and bony without any admixture of other blood; and the cause of the change lies in the altered food and habits of the people themselves. 

At the southern stations they are more in contact with the outside world, and, especially, there are English-speaking settlers living among them, cod-fishing and fur-trapping. The Eskimos are born imitators; they do what they see others do; and when they have settler folks living among them in little wooden shacks like their own, and passing in and out among them, it is small wonder that they fall into the settler habits of food and clothing. 

They take to garments of cloth instead of the sealskin that Nature has given them ; and they eat less of their raw meat and blubber and more of the bread and tea and cooked meats of the settlers. And Nature rebels. The southern Eskimos are, as a consequence, less hardy than their northern brethren; they cannot bear cold so well, but need more fire, more clothing, and more warm food; and their children are more puny. This is an unfortunate thing, but I must record it for completeness' sake, because it is one of the dangers that threatens the Eskimo people as civilisation overtakes them. If they give up their native foods they will dwindle and die out. This is my firm belief, and so I record with all the more satisfaction how I found my neighbours at Okak to be real Eskimo hunters. 

During the long winter that followed the home- coming of the families to their wooden homes in the village the men were seldom idle. In my visits to the houses I always found the women in charge and my question ** Aipait nannek& ? " (where is your husband ?) nearly always brought the answer "Sinamut aigivok " (he is off to the edge of the ice again). That is the hunting-place that the Eskimos love, the edge of the ocean ice, where the seals sport in the chilly water or clamber on the ice to rest. Sometimes, when sudden sickness has called me into the village in the small hours of the morning, I have heard the scufflings and yelpings of dogs, and have seen dim and shadowy men, dressed in sealskin clothes, trotting down the track among the hununocks towards the sea ice, off to the "sina." 

 I was fortified with a good breakfast of bacon and eggs— eggs kept in waterglass since the ship brought them last summer — but Gustaf would have none. "No," he said, "I shall eat by-and-by" ; and from what I had seen of Eskimo mealtimes I imagined him disposing of several pounds of seal-meat and a pint or two of weak tea when the day's work was done. Nevertheless I saw that he was chewing, pensively chewing with a steady champ, champ, champ, as he disentangled the dogs from one another. 

"What are you chewing?" said I. 

"Eoak" (frozen), answered Gustaf ; and he went on to tell me that he had got a mouthful of raw sealmeat; that was plenty; it was the custom of the people. "Ananak" (splendid) ; he said, "it makes me warm; it gives me sinews; piovok-illa" (good indeed). I envied him his warmth, for on a raw bleak morning like that the effects of bacon and hot coffee are soon gone, and I was forced to try to trot in the darkness to keep my circulation up.