These fur-clad philosophers are perhaps seen at their best in their play, for there is always harmony in the crystal nursery of the North, as these little people have no bad names nor threatening terms in their vocabulary Yet the play is often very rough, and your Eskimo lad is no molly-coddle. The writer watched five small boys playing football with a walrus-bladder among the roses on the edge of the Arctic. The game was neither Rugby nor "Soccer," but there seemed to be a good deal of tackling in it. Four of them got the fifth one, who hugged the ball, down, and were sitting on him and digging their skin boots into the soft parts of his anatomy. "You're angry, now," said a Major of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police who was looking on. "No, sir," said the under dog, with difficulty protruding his head, "I never get mad when I play."
The boys have a sort of duel which they have copied from their elders. It is customary for the grown men of the tribe to settle accumulated difficulties by standing a selected number of contestants, say four on each side, facing each other. Each man is allowed to strike his adversary a number of blows, the recipient of the buffeting being bound by the laws of the game to stand quiescent and take what is coming to him. Then striker and strikee change places and reverse the courtesy. All sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a row of "heathen" Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind, for the blows are no child's play. Think of what this self-inflicted discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball diamonds, and "sport" carnivals, and then do some more thinking. A line of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and out among the camps of the Eskimo,—"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control."
Farthest North Football
What of the little girls? They have dolls made of reindeer skins, rude imitations of their elders. And they play "house," and "ladies," and "visiting," just as their cousins do on every shore of the Seven Seas; but no little Eskimo girl has ever yet had the pleasure of dressing up in her mother's long dresses.
Two Spectators at the Game
When the ptarmigan gets dark in feather and the sun begins to return in spring after the long six months' night, it is the pleased prerogative of the children to blow out the lamp in the snow-house. All the time that the sun is travelling south, clever combinations of cat's-cradle are played by the mothers and the children to entangle the sun in the meshes and so prevent its being entirely lost by continuing south and south and forgetting entirely to turn back to the land of the anxiously-waiting Eskimo. The boys, by playing a cup-and-ball game, help, too, to hasten its return. When the sun forgets you for six months, you become fearful lest you have lost his loving care forever. The spring is an anxious time in more ways than one, for if there is any suffering from hunger it is felt now, when the winter supplies are finished and the new hunts not yet begun. "I'll eat my hat" is an empty threat in the south, but many an Eskimo kiddie has satisfied the gnawing pains of spring hunger by chewing his little skin boots.