Dressing walrus-hides is the only serious hard labor which the Alaskan Innuit subjects himself to. He cannot lay it entirely upon the women, as the Sioux do when they spread buffalo bodies all over the plains. It is too much for female strength alone, and so the men bear a hand right lustily in this business. It takes from four to six stout natives, when a green walrus-hide is removed, to carry it to a sweating-hole, where it is speedily unhaired. Then, stretched alternately upon air-frames and pinned over the earth, it is gradually scraped down to a requisite thinness for use in covering the bidarrah skeletons, etc.
There are probably six or seven thousand human beings in Alaska who live largely by virtue of the existence of Rosmarus, and every year, when the season opens, they gather together by settlements, as they are contiguous, and discuss the walrus chances for a coming year as earnestly and as wisely as our farmers who confer over their prospects for corn and potatoes. But an Eskimo hunter is a sadly improvident mortal, though he is not wasteful of morse life, while we are provident, and yet wasteful of our resources.
If the North Pole is ever reached by our people, they will do so only when they can eat walrus-meat and get plenty of it—at least that is my belief—and, knowing now what the diet is, I think the journey to that hyperborean ultima is a long one, though there is plenty of meat and many men who want to try it.
PINNACLE ISLET
An Active Volcanic Nodule near St. Matthew’s Island: (bearing W. N. W. 2m.)
Unless we spend a winter in the Arctic Ocean above Bering Straits we will not be able to see a polar bear; but there is one place, and one place only, in Alaska where in midsummer we can land, and there behold on its swelling, green, and flowery uplands hundreds of these huge ursine brutes. That place is the island of St. Matthew, and it is right in our path as we leave St. Lawrence and head for Oonimak Pass and home.
Mahlemoöts Landing a Walrus.
[An Innuit “double purchase.” St. Lawrence Island.]
St. Matthew Island is an odd, jagged, straggling reach of bluffs and headlands, connected by bars and lowland spits. The former, seen at a little distance out at sea, resemble half a dozen distinct islands. The extreme length is twenty-two miles, and it is exceedingly narrow in proportion. Hall Island is a small one that lies west from it, separated from it by a strait (Sarichev) less than three miles in width, while the only other outlying land is a sharp, jagged pinnacle-rock, rearing itself over a thousand feet abruptly from the sea, standing five miles south of Sugar-loaf Cone on the main island. From a cleft and blackened fissure, near the summit of this serrated pinnacle-rock, volcanic fire and puffs of black smoke have been recorded as issuing when first discovered, and they have issued ever since.