Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/91

Image missingFig. 45.Trace and harness. little tray made of a rough piece of walrus hide, or a flat slab of ice, hollowed like a bowl". At Iglulik they sometimes used a sort of toboggan of this kind, made of baleen joined together (also called uniútaq); it is presumably one of these that Lyon^[1] means when he says that a man made a substitute for a sledge "by plaiting whalebone, with which wretched contrivance they would have attempted to set out".

The sledge load is laid upon skin; if there is meat or blubber in the load, it is packed in sealskin; otherwise caribou skin is used. The skins under the load have the hair side downwards; over the load is laid a covering of skins with the hair upwards. The load is then lashed firm with the lashing thong (napuliut), a strong seal-thong which is passed round the ends of the cross-pieces and Dulled very tight. When there are rails on the sledge, these support the load very considerably.

To the draught-strap are fastened the traces (ipiutat), to the other end of which is fastened the harness of the dogs (ano). Fig. 45 (Ponds Inlet) shows a trace and Image missingFig. 46.Method of fastening the trace buckle. harness; the trace is of seal-thong, 4.6 m long, divided into two pieces which are held together by a loop and a small toggle (sanariaq) of musk-ox horn, 7.3 cm long, At the rear end is a trace buckle (orseq) of whale bone of the usual shape with two holes, one large and one small, drilled in the same direction; it is 6.5 cm long. The method of fastening the trace buckle to the trace is shown in fig. 46. The harness is of unhaired seal-skin straps, about 2½ cm broad; it con-