It was a great thing when the men would come home from a hunt, for then we would have a great deal to talk about:--how far they went, how cold it was, how they found the bear, or walrus, or seal, and who was most active and brave in killing it. Father would often say to mother, "Oh, how I wish you had been along, for we had such a nice drink of warm blood." The warm blood of a dying animal was considered the greatest luxury we could get, because we had not any cooked food at all. We ate it all frozen and raw, except when fresh from the animal. It was a great thing to strike the animal first with a spear, for the one who drew first blood was owner of the skin and was the boss of the whole job. They just had to cut it to suit him. The flesh was divided equally between all the hunters.
Sometimes we used to get very tired in the dark snow-house, and then we would try a little amusement. Two of us would sit down on the fur carpet and look into one another's faces and guess who was the prettiest. We had to guess, for we had no looking-glass in which to see our own faces. The one whose face shone slickest with the grease was called the prettiest.
If at any time we grew too tired of it all and ventured to romp and play, we were in danger of being punished. As there were no trees from which to cut switches there, they took a different way. When any child was naughty, mother would take a bone and she would put it into the fire and leave it there until it was hot enough for the grease to boil out. Then she would take it and slap that on her child and burn it. She was not particular where she burned her child, only she was careful not to touch the face.
I can well remember what I got my last punishment for. I had been playing with my little brother inside the snow-house and I got mad at him, and so I threw him down and bit him on the back of the neck. Then mother heated a bone and burned me on the same place where I bit him. I got tired of that and didn't do that kind of a trick afterwards.
But it was not always so that we had to stay in the snow-house. Once in a while father would come in and say it was not so cold as usual, and then we would have a chance to look round outside the snow-house. We never took a long walk. As nearly as I can remember, my father's house was on a low plain near the sea-shore. It sloped gently inland, and we could have seen a great way into the back country if it had not been for the great snowdrifts and masses of ice. There were some steep, jagged rocks in sight of our village, and during the long daytime enough of the snow would melt off to leave the rocks bare in a few places. On these bare spots we would find a kind of brown moss, which we gathered and dried to light our fires with.
We never saw anything green in Greenland, and I never could understand why they called it by that name.
When we looked out toward the ocean, we could not see very far, for even in the warmest season there was only a small space of open water, and beyond that the ice was all piled up in rough, broken masses.
The great event in our family life, however, was the dog-sleigh ride. When father told us we could go, we came as near dancing and clapping our hands for joy as Esquimaux children ever did. But we did not have a fine cutter, with large horses and chiming bells. We did not even have an old-fashioned bobsled, in which young men and young women have such good times in your country.
Sometimes the sleigh would be made of a great wide piece of bone from the jaws of a whale, one end of which turned up like a runner. But more often it would be either a skin of some animal laid flat on the ground, or a great frozen fish cut in two at the back and then turned right over. I never saw such a fish in this country, or in Iceland, so I cannot tell what kind of fish it was.
Our sleigh was drawn by dogs--sometimes six and sometimes ten or twelve. Each dog had a collar round his neck and a strip of reindeer hide tied into the collar and to the sleigh. When the dogs were well broken, they did not need any lines to guide them; but if they were not well trained, they had to have lines to control them. While we were getting ready to start, the dogs would jump about and whine and be as anxious to go as fiery horses in this country. The trained dogs would run forward and put their noses right into their collars without any trouble. When all was ready, away we went! It was great fun! The dogs could carry the sleigh faster than horses do in this country. Sometimes the sleigh was bumped and tumbled about a good deal on the rough ice, and once in a while it tipped over.