Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/147

A tent sheet from Ponds Inlet, belonging to a tent with two crosses, is 3.70 m long, 4.50 m wide; it consists of four whole, hairy and four whole, hairless seal skins, as well as a large number of small pieces, twelve to thirteen skins seeming to have been used to make this tent sheet. The rear part is hairy, the fore part unhaired except two strips on each side of the ridge of the tent.

Another tent-sheet, from the Aivilingmiut, is 4.05 × 3.20 m wholly of hairy skin, 4 whole and 17 pieces, presumably about 7 skins in

all. To it belong a ridge-pole, a board 76 × 10 cm, in the ends of which are rectangular, oblique holes for the stays which have supported it. A piece of seal skin, 30 cm wide, hangs down from its lower edge.

Wooden doors are now commonly used for seal-skin tents; as a rule they are the same doors that are used for the snow houses in winters; in these cases the tent sheet is sewn to the frame of the door.

I saw at Ponds Inlet that holes in the tent sheet were repaired by means of small, round, white pieces of seal skin, over which were sewn smaller, round pieces of dark seal skin; splits were repaired with strips of white seal skin, over which were sewn two rows of small, square, black pieces of seal skin.

Of caribou skin tents I have only seen a single specimen, at Ipiutaq May 1922 (Fig. 81). Its skeleton consisted of two crosses of poles 1.8 m high, at a distance of 1.2 m from each other. The crosses were