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Over these is generally laid a seal-skin as a flooring, and in the summertime a pair of deer’s horns are attached to the sledge as a back, which in the winter are removed to enable them when stopping to turn the sledge up, so as to prevent the dogs running away with it.

From here we can all see well how the hare runs for the field.” In very truth, the hare felt behind it the hunters and the pack; it was making for the field; it stretched out behind it its ears like two deer’s horns; it showed like a long grey streak extended above the ploughed land; beneath it its legs stuck out like four rods; you would have said that it did not move them, but only tapped the earth on the surface, like a swallow kissing the water.

In cutting out the clothes, the women do it after one regular and uniform pattern, which probably descends unaltered from generation to generation. The skin of the deer’s head is always made to form the apex of the hood, while that of the neck and shoulders comes down the back of the jacket; and so of every other part of the animal, which is appropriated to its particular portion of the dress.

They draw and pluck their fowls, skin and paunch their quadrupeds, but dress their fish with the scales on, and without gutting; they leave the scales, entrails, and bones, till they eat the fish, when they throw the offal away. Their food is chiefly beeves, turtle, several species of snakes, broth made of deer’s humbles, peas, beans, &c.

From a cache in the rocks Pete brought forth a miscellaneous lot of trappers’ stores, bone needles made from the splints of deer’s legs, elk’s teeth with holes bored through them, and odds and ends of all kinds.

If it answers the expectations, it is poured out into a calabash, or little pot of Indian manufacture, which is carefully covered with a couple of leaves, and over them a piece of deer’s skin, tied round with a cord. They keep it in the most dry part of the hut; and from time to time suspend it over the fire, to counteract the effects of dampness.

A piece of deer’s horn or curved bone, only a foot long, is used as a rod, and completes this very rude part of their fishing-gear. Of their mode of killing seals in the winter I have already spoken in the course of the foregoing narrative, as far as we were enabled to make ourselves acquainted with it.