[THE ESKIMO]
You will be able to remember what you read and to tell about it much better if you form the habit of making a brief outline as you go along. You can learn to make this outline without writing anything down, but in the beginning it would be a good plan to write down the topics as you come to them.
At the end of this selection you will find suggestions for making an outline.
Suppose there was no grocery where you could get bread or flour or potatoes, no meat shop, no milk dealer. Make it worse and suppose there was no place where you could buy clothes, shoes, coal or wood, balls or bats, sleds or knives. Suppose you had to go without all these things unless your father and mother or brothers and sisters helped you to make them. You would all have to work very hard and even then be poor, and often hungry, cold, and wet. You could not live in town because there is not ground enough there to raise potatoes and other things to eat. You would have to live in the country, where there is more land near each home. Your father would have to learn how to build a house, how to make shoes, how to make his tools, and how to do many things which the people you know never need to think about now. Your mother would have to make even the cloth for your clothes and to prepare all the food you had. That is, your family would have to make everything that you had in your home, or that you ate, or wore, or played with, or used in the garden. They would be busy all the time. Every family would have to have more businesses or trades than you can find in some small towns, and many of the things you have now they could not make at all, so you would not have them. For a long time, a very long time, that is the way people used to live all over the world. It was a hard life. There are even yet many places where people do not use machines and where every family makes everything for its own use.
The Eskimos live that way. Their country is far away to the north. It is a very poor, cold country, where very few things will grow, so there are not many Eskimos. Robinson Crusoe tried living all by himself for a while, but he had a lot of tools from the ship, and his island was rich in food and wood. He found goats there that gave milk; he found good wild grapes and other fruits; but he said he had to work very hard, even though he did not have any family to support. The Eskimo country is much poorer than Crusoe's island. It is away up north where the winter is very long and cold, and the summer is so short that no trees grow, and there are not many other plants. The Eskimo has no animals to give milk; he never heard of potatoes or bread, to say nothing of cake.
It is hard to get the things you need in such a country. For a winter house the Eskimo often builds a little hut of snow. Many boys and girls in the cooler parts of the United States and Canada have built a little snow house for sport, but the Eskimo finds it the warmest house he can get. If it has a window, you cannot see through it, for it is a piece of fish skin that looks like dirty glass. To keep the cold out he makes the doorway so low that people must crawl in. Then he builds a long tunnel outside the door to keep the wind out, and puts a chunk of snow in the outer end of the tunnel for a door. Along the sides of the house inside is a bank of snow covered with skins. This is both chair and bed.
If he made the room as warm as we make our houses, the roof would melt and drip down his neck. But he does not have enough fire to warm it much anyhow. The little fire he has for cooking is made by burning the fat of animals in an oil lamp.
