Page:Archæology of the Central Eskimos.djvu/442

Comer's material;^[1] the tattooing was performed at marriage, although the chin marks were not added until the oldest son had caught his first seal. This tattooing could be put on by anybody, although there were certain women who were especially expert and were paid for their work.

Snow goggles of wood were sometimes used by older men; the younger ones merely used a fox tail which was tied round the eyes.

Personal cleanliness seems to have been on a very low level; in particular they were always sodden with blubber on body and clothes and the soot which covered everything inside the houses did not make Image missingFig. 94.Tattooing of the Sadlermiut. matters any better. As an example of how indifferent they were to blubber on their clothes, it was related that when flensing walruses or whales, they often carried pieces of blubber up to the houses by cutting a hole in the middle of them and putting them over their heads like a collar! No wonder "their hair was like baleen." They had large numbers of lice on them, too; they used a bone stick with a whisp of bear hair on the end as a lice catcher.

The sledges were of whalebone, the runners of jaw-bone, the cross pieces often of rib. On new ice they used very short sledges of walrus tusks, each runner formed of two or three tusks lashed together, the cross pieces also being of tusks; one man could just sit on one of these sledges. The whalebone sledges were smaller, but heavier, than those of the Aiviliks. In the middle of the first cross piece was a hole, through which the draught line, which was fastened to the runners in the usual way, passed; the dogs pulled better in this way, it was said. (Some of the pieces of whalebone, with holes and notches, which in the foregoing have been described as fragments of mattocks, from Naujan, Ponds Inlet and Kuk, are possibly of such cross trees; but as they are all broken it has been impossible to decide this). Sometimes sledges were made of which the runners and cross pieces were of walrus hide. Ice and mud shoes were used (Saorre does not remember that he has seen mud shoes, however). The sledge lashings were often of baleen thong. No uprights were used. The dog traces were shorter than those of the Aiviliks and, like these, of unequal lengths; they were fastened to the draught line, often with a small trace buckle; the toggles which the Aiviliks use to hold the two parts of the traces together were not used by the Sadlermiut. The