Hilltop used a double-ended paddle for his kayak.
White men looked peculiar, too—their beards, for instance. Eskimos almost never had beards, but white men either shaved or had a lot of hair on their faces. White men's beards were a nuisance in winter, because they filled up with icicles and made faces freeze.
Dogs helped hunt bears. The men had to aim their guns carefully. A good dog was worth more than a bearskin.
Even funnier were the traders who had hairy faces but no hair at all on the tops of their heads. Hilltop and Driftwood had never seen a bald Eskimo.
USING NEW THINGS
The Eskimos laughed at all the things that seemed so strange and foolish to them. They laughed, too, about the useful things that the white men brought. It was good to light a seal oil lamp with matches instead of a bow-drill. It was safer to kill a polar bear with a gun than with a spear.
Now that the Eskimos had guns, hunting was easier, but they had to do more of it. They killed animals for their own use, and they did extra hunting because they needed furs to trade with the white men for bullets and guns and new things to make their homes more comfortable.
Hunters drove caribou into lakes where it was easy to shoot them from kayaks.