Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/169

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house, as otherwise the snow will soon melt. Fig. 100 a (Iglulingmiut. Qajûvfik) shows the typical form of snow beater, which is also figured by Boas;[1] it is of wood, 43 cm long, 1.7 cm thick, with rounded edges and a shaped handle with a knob at the end and one shoulder. Four other specimens of the same form have lengths from 40 to 53 cm; on one of them the end-knob is a separate piece, of antler, lashed on. From Repulse Bay we have a snow beater in the form of a thin, crooked branch of antler, 39 cm long, maximum thickness 1½ cm, pointed at one end (Fig. 100 b). For a length of 9 cm the handle is furnished with 28 grooves.

The remaining household furniture includes various boxes, bags. and sacks for keeping tools, clothing, etc. Small toolboxes (qijorqut). wooden boxes about 50 × 15 × 15 cm, are nearly always part of the travelling equipment. Sacks (ikpiarssuk) are used for keeping clothing, pieces of skin, etc.; canvas sacks are mostly used nowadays. Fig. 101 (Ponds Inlet) is a clothes bag of unhaired seal skin; the bottom forms an almost circular piece, 25 × 27 cm; the sides consist of a piece of skin sewn together by a longitudinal seam, about 80 cm high; the upper mouth is edged with a strip, 2½ cm wide, in which are ten holes for a running cord; the sewing (running stitches) is done with sinew thread. Another clothes bag from Ponds Inlet consists of black, unhaired sealskin with the hair-side out; the bottom is in one piece, the sides another and the mouth-edge consists of a 5–6 cm wide strip of light-coloured sealskin; near the bottom the diameter is about 24 cm, at the mouth 15 cm; depth 25 cm. A third clothes bag, from the Iglulingmiut, Ponds Inlet, has its bottom and one side of bladder skin, the other side and the 6 cm mouth-edge of partly unhaired caribou skin; diameter near the mouth 18 cm, at the mouth 10 cm; depth 25 cm.

Bags of bird's foot skin were figured as long ago as by Parry[2] and also by Boas.[3] Fig. 102 (Southampton Island) is a similar bag made of the skin of swans' feet. In the middle of the bottom is a circular, white piece of seal skin, 11 cm in diameter. The remainder of the bottom, which is about 25 cm in diameter, and the sides, consist of six wide strips of swan's foot skin with the claws still on, alternating with thinner strips of white seal skin, drawn through with thin strips of black seal skin, the free ends of which project at the top. Round the rather narrow mouth (about 12 cm in diameter) is a white strip of seal skin, about 5½ cm wide. From Iglulik we have a smaller bag, formed of gull feet; in the bottom is a small piece of white seal skin, 2½ cm in diameter; at the top a strip of seal skin

  1. ↑ 1901 fig. 147.
  2. ↑ 1824, p. 550. :3.
  3. ↑ 1907 Pl. VII, p. 402.
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