As for smells, what is a bad smell? The Eskimo doesn't seem to know. In Kipling's wonderful address on "Travel," before the Royal Geographical Society, he had much to say about smells, and how they suggest places. Eskimo taken to the World's Fair in Chicago were homesick for the smell of decaying blubber, rancid whale-meat, steaming bodies in the igloo, the rich perfume of the dogs, and all the other aromatic comforts of home. As smells are their special delight, so dirt is their peculiar glory. A bath in warm water would make them as unhappy as it makes a cat.
Fond of eating as they are, they like a change of food, and if bear-meat is all they find to eat in a certain spot, they hitch up and hike on to a better meal at a distance. They always want to be on the go. They rarely stay in one place more than a year or two.
Even the rifle does not seem, in the long run, to be helping them much. When the sealer used a harpoon, he hardly ever missed the seal, for he always struck at close range. But with the rifle, shooting from afar, the sea often swallows up his prey ere he can reach it. The walrus has gone to the farthest North and the seal is becoming gun-shy very fast.
As a hunter, the Eskimo is not wanting in nerve. A mighty hunter north of Nain was out gunning for big birds—ptarmigan, guillemot and divers,—when he came on a robust and fierce polar bear, a monstrous specimen.
The Eskimo had a shotgun, not a rifle. It takes a ball cartridge of large calibre to do for Mr. Bruin ordinarily—and he can "make his getaway" with a good deal of lead in him. But the "husky" calmly walked up close to the bear, and discharged his shotgun pointblank in the face of the astonished animal. If the hunter had been at a distance, the bear would have minded the dose about as much as a pinch of pepper. As it was, the animal was blinded, and turned in fury on the hunter.
The Eskimo tore off his sealskin tunic and threw it over the bear's head, the way a bull-fighter confuses a charging bull with a mantilla. The bear stopped to tear the garment in pieces before proceeding to kill and devour the owner.
But the delay was fatal to Mr. Bear. In jig-time the hunter had reloaded the gun. He put the second charge into the bear's head through the eye,—and the monster expired at his feet.
The boys have bows and arrows; they begin by practising on small birds and later become proficient with a gun, so that by the time they are twelve years old they are veteran hunters.
The greatest joy in the life of the Eskimo is to spend a day in a seal-hunt.
Hours before dawn, the hunter climbs a rock and looks out to sea, anxious to learn if it will be a good day for his watery business.