VILLAGE AND ISLET OF POONOOK
Mahlemoöt Winter Houses on the Poonook Islets, 6 miles East of St. Lawrence
The lower plains have a richer, warmer, yellowish-green tone than that cold tint of the uplands, while the sand of the sea-shore is a bright light-brown. Small streams flow down from these hills, and twist and turn sluggishly through the tundra as they lead to lakes or empty directly into the sea—a few parr, or young salmon, being the only fish in them that can be found; most of the fresh-water lakes and lagoons are, however, fairly stocked with familiar-looking mullets (Catastomus), but nothing else.
The entire expanse of these lowlands of St. Lawrence are precisely like all of those vast reaches of Alaskan tundra—they are great saturated, earthy sponges, filled and overrunning with water in midsummer—the chief and happiest vegetation upon them being that same beautiful tufted or plumed grass which we noticed at Michaelovsky, since the white and silken tassels of its feathery inflorescence never fail to charm even tired and travel-worn eyes. This grass, in conjunction with several rank-growing mosses, the trailing runners of the crowberry-vines, and little patches of the humble arctic raspberry (Rubus chamæmorus) make up that conventional tundra color of russet-green (flecked with grayish-blue spots on the slopes of stern northern exposures) which mark these great marshy tracts of Alaska, and under which eternal frost is found, even in midsummer, a foot or two only from their surfaces. Small white shells of a land-mollusk (succinea) are scattered thickly over these moorlands.
On the flats of the east shore of St. Lawrence a great abundance of drift-wood was piled in much confusion. Here the natives had a wood-cutting camp, hewing and carving; its chips were scattered all along the beach-levels for miles. There are places, here, where the ice in some unusual seasons has carried large logs and pieces of drift-wood far back, full half a mile from the sea, and a vigorous growth of tundra vegetation now flourishes in between; and there they lie to-day deeply embedded in the swale, settling down in decay—that slow, hungering eremacausis of the Arctic.
The Innuits, living here as they do, some three or four hundred in number, are great walrus-hunters. They enjoy a location that enables them to secure these animals at all seasons of a year. In winter the sea-horse floats on big ice-fields; but during summer-time the “aibwook” hauls up to sun and rest his heavy body in and on the inviting peace of those beaches of St. Lawrence. A famous spot for this landing of the walrus is on the rocky and pebbly shores of Poonook (three small rocky islets), just five miles east of the summer tents of Kagallegak. These tiny, detached fragments of St. Lawrence stand in the full sweep of those air- and water-currents which keep broad ice-floes in constant motion, and thus bring walrus-herds into range of Mahlemoöt hunters, who have a winter village dug deep into sandy flats of “Poonookah.”
Naturally enough we regard the walrus with more than passing interest, for it plays so large and so vital a part in sustaining the life of human beings who reside in these arctic and subarctic regions of Alaska. Perhaps the only place in all this extended area in which these clumsy brutes are found, where the creature itself can be closely observed and studied, is that unique islet, six miles east of St. Paul (Pribylov group) and about four hundred miles south of St. Lawrence.
The Walrus-hunter.
[A St. Lawrence Mahlemoöt—in winter parka with the hood removed. August 16, 1874.]