Fig. 309.—Snow drill.
[Ice picks.]—
The ivory ice pick (tu´u) always attached to the seal-harpoon has been already described. This differs from the tôk of the Greenlanders and other eastern Eskimo in having a sharp bayonet point, while the latter is often chisel-pointed. All the men now have iron ice picks which they use for cutting the holes for fishing, setting seal nets, and such purposes. These are made of some white man’s tool which has a socket, like a harpoon iron, a whale lance, a boarding knife or bayonet, and usually have a rather slender blade about a foot long, mounted on a pole 6 or 8 feet long. The point is sharp and polygonal, generally four-sided. The tool is managed with both hands and used to split off fragments of ice by rather oblique blows. In other words, it is used in precisely the same way as the little single-handed pick which we use in refrigerators. For chiseling off projecting corners of ice when making a path out through the ice pack, they often use whale spades, of which they have obtained a great many from wrecks.
No. 89483 [1313] from Utkiavwĭñ, is a very old pick made of a piece of reindeer antler, 11¼ inches long, split lengthwise, and tapered to a sharp curved point. The butt is cut into a sort of tang with a low shoulder. The split face is concave, the soft interior tissue having been removed by decay and perhaps also intentionally. Another peculiar tool is shown in Fig. 309 (No. 89479 [1064] from Utkiavwĭñ). This was called kăkaiyaxion, and is a rounded piece of antler 10.4 inches long, tapering from the butt where there is a low shoulder and the broken remains of a rounded tang to be fitted to a shaft. One side is cut off flat from the shoulder to the tip, gradually becoming concave. The concavity is deepest near the middle. The tip is slightly expanded, rounded, and somewhat bent toward the convex side. The specimen is smoothly and neatly made and dark brown from age. No other specimens were seen. We were told that this tool was mounted on a long pole and used for drilling holes in the ice by making the pole revolve with the hands.
Fig. 310.—Ice scoop.
[Ice scoops.]—
When picking a hole through the ice they use a long-handled scoop, made of a piece of antler bent round into a hoop, and netted across the bottom with strips of whalebone, so that the water may drain off in dipping pieces of ice out of the water. We brought home one specimen of this universal implement (No. 89903 [1696], Fig. 310). The handle is of oak, 5 feet 1¾ inches long and elliptical in section. The rim of the bowl is a long thin strip of antler, apparently from the “palm,” bent round into a pointed oval, 8½ inches long and 5¾ wide, with the ends of the strip overlapping about 3 inches at the broader end. The ends are sewed together with two vertical stitches of whalebone. The left end has been broken across obliquely near the joint and mended with whalebone stitches. Round the lower edge of the rim runs a row of twenty-seven pairs of small holes 0.2 inch from the edge. The holes of each pair are connected by a deep channel, and a narrow shallow groove, probably for ornament, joins the pairs. On the left side are eight extra holes between the pairs, which are not used. Through these holes, omitting the first two pairs in the right-hand end, is laced a piece of seal thong, thus: Starting at the point of the oval, the two ends of the thong are passed through the pair of holes there from the outside and the bight drawn home into the channel; the ends are crossed, the left end going to the right, and vice versa, and passed out through the farther hole of the next pair and in through the nearer, and so on till the ends meet at the broad end of the oval where they are tied together, thus making twenty-five loops on the inside of the rim into which the netting is fastened. This is made of strips of thin whalebone, interwoven, over and under each other, passing up through one loop and down through the next. There are eleven longitudinal strands passing obliquely from right to left, the same number from left to right, and eleven transverse strands, making a network with elongated hexagonal apertures. The strips are not one continuous piece. The bowl thus made is fastened to the handle by three pieces of stout seal thong. The whole lashing was put on wet, and allowed to shrink.
Nordenskiöld mentions and figures a scoop of almost identically the same pattern, but smaller, in general use for the same purposes at Pitlekaj.[417] A smaller scoop or skimmer (ĕlauatĭn) is also universally used. We inadvertently neglected to preserve a specimen of this very common implement, though we had two or three about the station for our own use. I shall therefore have to describe it from memory. The handle is a flat, straight stick with rounded edges, about 18 inches or 2 feet long, 1½ inches broad, and three-fourths inch thick. The bowl is made of two pieces of antler “palm” of such a shape that when they are fastened together on the end of the stick they make a shallow cup about 3½ inches long by 3 wide, with a longitudinal crevice along the middle which allows the water to drain off. The tip of the handle is beveled off on both sides so as to fit into the inside of this cup, along the junction of the two pieces, each of which is fastened to it by one or two neat stitches of whalebone. The two pieces are fastened together in front of the handle with a stitch.