Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/90

Sledges with runners of skin are sometimes used. In summer when the young men go caribou hunting in the interior with their families and their chattels, they do not take a sledge with them as a rule; it is too troublesome to carry about. And then, when there is sufficient snow for sledging, they make sledges of caribou skins and antlers. On Southampton Island, in the winter of 1922–23, I saw three such sledges. One was made of one caribou skin, divided longitudinally and the halves folded lengthwise with the hair side. inwards and then frozen together in that form; the nose was bent up a little. The dimensions of the runners were 2.0 m, 22 and 9 cm; their distance apart 55 cm. Four pieces of antler and one piece of wood were used as cross-pieces. The runners were shod with mud and then ice, formed by laying snow in water and then rubbing it on. This sledge was so light that a man could carry it with ease. Another sledge was made of two caribou skins. On this the dimensions of the runners were 3 m, 20 and 10 cm, distance apart 40 cm; mud shoeing; six cross-pieces; the runner-noses slightly upturned. These sledges are fairly durable; if only the dogs are prevented from eating them they can last a whole winter; they have difficulty in standing pack ice, however. Sometimes the runners are stiffened by a layer of mud or a few caribou leg bones being laid inside them.

In earlier days, when wood was more scarce than it is now, skin sledges were more common. A man about 65 years old was able to remember that in his childhood there were only two wooden sledges at Iglulik; the other men made sledges of walrus hide in winter: two pieces were folded over with wet snow between and frozen together into very hard runners; walrus penis-bones were used as crosspieces. When they returned from the caribou hunt in autumn the seal-skin tents were often made into sledge runners, antlers being used as cross-pieces; a sledge of this sort was called qerqetitaq. The earlier writers also refer to sledges with runners of seal and walrus hide.^[1]

On certain occasions when they had no other sledge or the snow was too soft for them, a kind of sledge without runners was used, often simply a caribou or bear skin, to which the dogs were harnessed. In October 1922 the meat of a whole and a half caribou was carried to the house at Hansine Lake on a caribou skin (uniútaq), which glided easily over the smooth ice of the lake drawn by five dogs. At Iglulik, when there was soft snow, a sledge of walrus hide without runners (atdleraq) was sometimes used; Lyon^[2] writes: "we sometimes saw a person who had but one or two dogs, driving in a