Hypocarnivory

At Flaxman Island Dr. Anderson and I talked over plans for the winter in detail. From a zoological point of view it seemed most important for him to go into the mountains south of Barter Island in search of the scientifically unknown mountain sheep, which would probably prove to be a variety of the Ovis dalli, and which, by native account, were fairly abundant. He would later on, if everything went well, go still farther south, beyond the mountains and the mountain sheep country, into the Yukon Valley, where he hoped to take some specimens of the also scientifically unknown caribou of northern Alaska. These plans of his eventuated very well. During the four months that intervened between this and our next meeting he secured numerous specimens of sheep, caribou, and other far northern mammals, and incidentally had his first experience of “living on the country.” In fact the caribou proved much more abun dant than we had hoped for; so abundant that had it not been for a shortage of tobacco, Dr. Anderson would have found considerable difficulty in inducing the Eskimo to leave the fleshpots and com fortable forest camps of the Yukon slope for the Arctic coast, where they could look forward to nothing better than living on the provisions we had purchased at Point Barrow; and living on “white men's grub ” is always a hardship to an Eskimo. It was, incidentally, Dr. Anderson's first experience of living without salt, an ordeal which he had much dreaded, for he shared the common belief that salt is a necessary article of diet. But it turned out, as I knew from experience it would, that he did not mind it seriously. 

Most people are in the habit of looking upon the articles of our accustomed diet, and especially upon salt, as necessities. We have not found them so. The longer you go without grain foods and vegetables the less you long for them. Salt I have found to behave like a narcotic poison —in other words, it is hard to break off its use, as it is hard to stop the use of tobacco; but after you have been a month or so without salt you cease to long for it, and after six months I have found the taste of meat boiled in salt water distinctly disagreeable. In the case of such a necessary element of food as fat, on the other hand, I have found that the longer you are without it the more you long for it, until the craving becomes much more intense than is the hunger of a man who fasts. (The symptoms of starvation are those of a disease rather than of being hungry.) Among the uncivilized Eskimo the dislike of salt is so strong that a saltiness imperceptible to me would prevent them from eating at all. This circumstance was often useful to me later in our travels about Coronation Gulf, for whenever our Eskimo visitors threatened to eat us out of house and home we could put in a little pinch of salt, and thus husband our resources without seeming inhospitable. A man who tasted anything salty at our table would quickly bethink him that he had plenty of more palatable fare in his own house.

That evening when I came home I found that Palaiyak also, as well as Pannigabluk, was sick. Evidently it was the diet that was telling on them. On our journey up river from the sea we had lived on oil straight, and we had eaten so much of it that by the time we reached our camp we had only a pint or two left in a bag of oil that should, under ordinary circumstances, have lasted us for several months. The meat we had was all lean; we had therefore for some time been living on a diet of exclusively lean meat, which had aggravated the diarrhoea from which Ilavinirk suffered and which had now brought down my two companions. 

Evidently, with two invalided out of three, it was not possible for us to proceed farther with our hunt, and we decided to return home. It was not only the illness of my companions that prompted this, but also the belief that Dr. Anderson and Natkusiak must surely have arrived by now, and I felt that with them to help me, the chances of success in the hunt to the south would be immeasurably greater. 

On our return home, however, there was no sign of Anderson, which caused us worry of two sorts ; for something must have gone wrong with him to keep him away so long, and something was likely to go wrong with us, if he did not come back, with only one able hunter to take care of seven people and six dogs in a country which the caribou seemed to have temporarily abandoned. And the tantalizing thing was to feel that the caribou could not be far away and that if we only had one or two able-bodied men to make up a sled party we were sure to overtake them. Inaction was not to be thought of, however, and Ilavinirk , although he was sick, realized this as keenly as I did, so he urged that we make another attempt to hunt upstream , in which he himself and Palaiyak would follow the river, making camps for me, while I hunted the east bank of the river into the Barren Ground, as I had hunted the west bank through the forest on the first attempt made with Pannigabluk and Palaiyak. On December 22d I happened to think that Natkusiak had, two months before, set some dead-fall traps and baited them with pieces of blubber. I now revisited these traps and found that in some of them the blubber bait was still there. I picked these up and brought them home, and that evening all of us had some fat along with our meat, which did us a considerable amount of good.

By the beginning of March Dr. Anderson and Pikaluk were so completely recovered that they volunteered to make the six days' trip south to Langton Bay for the purpose of depositing there the sled load of ammunition and other necessities. It was our intention then, by the 10th of March to proceed inland from Langton Bay where we had wintered and to strike across country thence to the northeast corner of Bear Lake, with the purpose of thereafter working north in the summer down the Coppermine River until we should meet Eskimo. We know now that this would not have been a good plan to follow; it was made impractical by the arrival, March 6th, of Ilavinirk and others of the inland party. 

Ilavinirk's party told a tale of hardships and starvation rather worse than anything through which we had been previously. It had taken Natkusiak and Palaiyak a long time to reach them with the sled load of blubber. I had explained to Natkusiak when he started from Cape Parry that there was every need for hurry, for Ilavinirk's and Memoranna's parties had had practically nothing to eat when I left them. But Natkusiak could not realize that there was any real danger, and I do not think that there would have been any danger had Natkusiak been in Ilavinirk’s place. As it was, however, instead of hurrying, Natkusiak stopped here and there on the way, in one place to catch fish because he had been so long without fish. and in another place to set traps because the trapping was good. Meantime Ilavinirk's and Memoranna's parties had had hard luck in hunting. There were caribou in the country. but the weather was continually bad and their management was not the best. The little food left on hand when I went away soon disappeared, and then followed the larger zoological specimens which I had preserved for Dr. Anderson in the fall. There were nine skins of caribou of both sexes and all ages, which I had taken off carefully with heads, horns, and leg bones, making also careful record of the measurements. These specimens were of great scientific value, for they represented in all probability a new variety of caribou, or if not that, at least caribou from a district where none had previously been taken for scientific purposes. One of these specimens especially was a rare thing. I have been present at the killing of a thousand caribou, and in all that number I have seen only three that were hornless in a season when they should have had horns. In other words, I have seen only three caribou upon the heads of which horns were destined never to grow. One of these I had carefully skinned for Dr. Anderson. In this period of scarcity the head of this rare muley caribou went for food along with the other scientific skins. The heads of all these animals and the leg bones went first and then the skins themselves, as well as other skins which we had intended for clothing. 

It was a period of scarcity not only among the human beings of that district but also among the wolves, all of which were skin poor and two of which died of starvation near our house at a place where their carcasses were found afterwards and eaten by our Eskimo. Pannigabluk was the only member of our party to whom wolf meat was taboo. The rest of us considered wolf, under ordinary circumstances, to be excellent eating. In summer when they are fat and caribou poor, all of us much preferred wolf meat to caribou. But those who tasted them were unanimous in saying that the wolves that died of starvation were no delicacy. 

When Natkusiak finally arrived at the camp on Horton River, the tide had just been turned by Memoranna's success in caribou hunting. From that time everything had gone well, but the two periods of starvation in one winter, which were the first of his entire life, had proved too much for Ilavinirk and his family, for they now came to me and told me that they felt sure that if we went farther east the coming spring, things would go still worse with them. In fact, they would not go east with me and had made up their minds to quit our service and go back to the Mackenzie River, where there was plenty of fish. where tea and tobacco could be had. and where they could attend church service now and then.

Seeing the white men at Point Barrow living in frame houses would of itself have been sufficient to induce the Eskimo to do likewise, for the white men are well- to -do and powerful, and therefore become leaders of fashion in the matter of houses as in other things. The Eskimo have not had the means to build houses as well constructed as those of the white men, and even had they had the houses they would not have had the resources to keep them supplied with fuel, for coal is naturally expensive. 

But the pernicious practice of building frame houses has had more than the passive encouragement of the resident whites. Active steps have been taken by various well-meaning persons to try to get the Eskimo to quit what the white men consider their “native hovels” in favor of the frame house. It is the natural tendency of the thought less white to assume that his ways are the best ways. Even the Department of Education has not been guiltless, for officers in Washington have issued, presumably on the basis of their experience of the climate of Virginia and Maryland, instructions to the school teachers in Alaska to encourage the Eskimo in general to adopt white men's ways. My friend Mr. J. E. Sinclair, who for a year taught the government school on Wainwright Inlet, told me that he had specific instructions to encourage the Eskimo to dig coal in the coal mine there with the double idea that they might use the coal for heating their houses, and that they might earn money with which to buy flour to eat instead of the seal meat and walrus which was their ordinary diet. It is hard for me personally to get the point of view of a man who thinks that coal mining is a more desirable occupation than seal hunting. It would be a safe bet that he himself has never either hunted seal or dug coal . But during the last few years there has fortunately come a change, largely, I believe, through the influence of Mr. Lopp and Mr. Evans, the present superintendent and assistant superintendent of the government schools of northern Alaska, who are men of considerable experience in the country, and who have come to see clearly that the white-man style of frame house is one of the most serious evils which they have to fight. Mr. Evans told me, the autumn of 1912, that he was doing everything he could to get the Eskimo to refrain from building frame houses and to induce them to go back to the building of houses of the old type. Any one who has the welfare of the Eskimo at heart will wish Mr. Evans success in his enterprise ; but any one who understands the Eskimo will fear that success will come with difficulty, if at all. For the frame house has unfortunately become fashionable. It is not easy to get our own people to refrain from certain habits — of dress, for instance on the ground that they are unhealthful. Neither will it be easy to get the Eskimo to avoid the frame house on the ground that it is dangerous to life . My experience of the Eskimo is that they are even more inclined than the white race to eat, wear, and use things on the ground that they are expensive and fashionable rather than on the ground that they are excellent in themselves.

NOTES ON PLANTS 

Very few plants outside of the trees and woody shrubs are put to economic use by the Eskimo. North of the limit of trees, the various species of shrub and ground willows are burned, as is also the Northern Dwarf Birch ( Betula nana Linn .). The latter, known as “ partridge-brush ” in the Great Bear Lake region, as ēk -fuk'tok by Alaskan Eskimo, and as av-al-lū'kret by the Coronation Gulf people, burns with a fierce heat, even when green , and can be used in a camp-stove if twisted into bunches. On the Barren Grounds, a species of heather, Cassiope tetragona (L.) D. Don. , is much used for fuel, particularly in the summer - time. It burns either green or dry, and can even be dug from under the snow and burned in winter. This species, or one very similar to it, is common in various places – in the Endicott Mountains, Alaska; King Point, Yukon Territory ; Langton Bay, Coronation Gulf, Dismal Lake, Dease River, and Great Bear Lake. It is called Ik -hlū'tit by the Coronation Gulf Eskimo ; Pi-la -rau -ū'it by western Alaskan Eskimo ( Port Clarence) ; and Tu -kak -shi-ū'uit by Mackenzie delta Eskimo. The inner bark of the Mountain Alder, Alnus alnobetula ( Ehrh .) Koch ., is often used to stain the inner side of tanned skins red . 

The only roots which I have seen used as food by the Eskimo are the roots of a species of Knotweed either Polygonum bistortum ( Tourn .) L., Polygonum viviparum L., or Polygonum fugax Small. The roots of plants of this genus, known to the Eskimo as Mā'sū, or Mā'shū, are frequently dug and eaten in summer, but usually only when there is a scarcity of meat or fish for food. These roots are fairly edible, either raw or cooked, having a slightly sweetish taste, but are somewhat woody and fibrous. On the Colville River, Alaska, the Eskimo preserve the Masu roots in sealskin “ pokes," and eat them in a somewhat fermented state. Several species of small ground -growing berries are often eaten by the western Eskimo, particularly a yellow berry called Ak'pek (the Cloudberry, Rubus chamæmarus Linn . ), the At'tsi-ak (Alpine Bearberry, Mairania alpina (Linn .) Desv. ), and the paun'rat (Crowberry, Empetrum nigrum Linn .). These berries are eaten by the Coronation Gulf Eskimo, except the akpek, the use of which is unknown, although in the opinion of white men and of the western Eskimo it is the best of all local berries. They are eaten by the Mackenzie Eskimo, but they say they did not use them extensively until taught to do so by the Alaskan Eskimo (not more than twenty -five years ago) . The leaves of Oxyria digyna (L.) , a species of sorrel, are frequently mixed with seal-oil and eaten as a sort of salad by the western Eskimo. The plant is called Kõ'na-ritj by Alaskan Eskimo. The partly digested stomach contents of the Barren Ground caribou are frequently eaten frozen in winter. Stomachs filled with reindeer-moss are considered much better than those from caribou which have been feeding on the coarse, woody fibers of grassy plants. As with most other viands, this dish is not considered complete without a liberal dressing of seal-oil. 

The collecting of plants on the expedition was only incidental for the greater part of the time, owing to lack of facilities for preserving and transporting specimens. A collection mainly of flowering plants from the north coast of Alaska was completely lost. A small lot of plants which survived the vicissitudes of northern travel were turned over to the New York Botanical Garden, Bronx Park, New York City, and were very kindly determined by Dr. P. A. Rydberg, as follows: 

Coronation Gulf. Mouth of Kogaryuak River, eighteen miles east of Coppermine River, Arctic coast, Canada, June 18th, 1911 . 

• Salix arctica Pallas. Rather small specimen. 

• Draba hirta L. Tall specimen. 

• Astragalus sp. An unknown species, somewhat resembling A. alpinus, but more slender, with small, narrow , grayish , hirsute leaflets, purple only on the tip of the keel, black -hairy calyx shorter than in A. alpinus. No fruit is found, which makes it impossible to characterize the plant fully. 

• Lupinus arcticus S. Wats. A form more grayish - pubescent than the Victoria Island specimen. 

• Hedysarum mackenzië Richards. A low specimen. 

• Rhododendron lapponicum L. (This species is abundant on south side of Coronation Gulf.) 

• Cassiope tetragona D. Don. Luxuriant specimens. ( Used for fuel .) 

• Pedicularis lanata Willd. Fair specimen. 

• Pedicularis arctica R. Br. Good specimen. Southwestern Victoria Island, fifteen miles east of Point Williams, July 21st, 1911 . 

• Salix phlebophylla And. Specimen with rather large leaves. 

• Papaver radicatum Rottb. In fruit. 

• Dryas integrifolia Vahl. Both the typical and the lobed -leaved forms. 

• Potentilla pulchella R. Br. Good specimen with rather narrow leaf. Lupinus arcticus S. Wats. The typical form. 

• Mairania alpina (L.) Desv. In leaves only. It is probably the red - fruited form . 

• Androsace chamæiasme arctica Kunth . Excellent specimens. 

• Statice sibirica ( Turcz .) Ledeb . Good specimens. 

• Chrysanthemum integrifolium Richards. Small specimen. Cape Bathurst, Arctic coast, Northwest Territory, Canada, July 6th, 1912. 

• Salix anglorum Cham. Typical. 

• Oxyria digyna (L.) Compt. Good specimens. (Often eaten as a relish . ) 

• Ranunculus nivalis L. Good typical specimens. 

• Draba glacialis Adams. In young flowers, small- leaved. 

• Cochlearis grænlandica L. In flowers. 

• Androsace chamaeiasme arctica Kunth . Excellent specimens. 

• Primula borealis Duby. Just beginning to bloom , therefore pedicils rather short . 

• Phlox richardsonii Hook. Best specimens seen of this rare plant. 

• Pneumaria maritima (L. ) Hill . Good specimens. King Point, Arctic coast, Yukon Territory, Canada, August 27th , 1912. 

• Polygonum fugax Small. Out of bloom and spike gone, but probably this form. 

• Vaccinim Vitis - Idæa L. Only a fragment. Valeriana capitata Pallas. Rather small specimen.

The Knotweed has some effects that might show us why it was considered famine food.

Although no specific mention has been made for this species, there have been reports that some members of this genus can cause photosensitivity in susceptible people. Many species also contain oxalic acid (the distinctive lemony flavour of sorrel) - whilst not toxic this substance can bind up other minerals making them unavailable to the body and leading to mineral deficiency.

https://pfaf.org/user/Plant.aspx?LatinName=Polygonum+viviparum