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Mangivik wore a coat or shirt of seal-skin with a hood to it, and his legs were encased in boots of the same material, which were long enough to cover nearly the whole of each leg and meet the skirt of the coat. The feet of the boots were of tough walrus-hide, and there was a short peak to the coat behind.
Near the handle it was about three inches broad, being thick cords of walrus-hide platted; it gradually tapered towards the point, where it terminated in a fine line of the same material. While driving, the long lash of this whip trails on the snow behind the sledge, and by a peculiar sleight of hand its serpentine coils can be brought up for instant use.
It is a matter simply of catching fish in their nets during the summer, and in winter trapping the ptarmigan or wild grouse and hunting the walrus and the seal. Their boats, or "kyaks," made from walrus-hide and repaired with ivory, are very ingeniously contrived and cleverly managed. They are naturally a very peaceful people, except when, in violation of the law, the white man sells them whisky.
The mukluks, with walrus-hide soles, were composed of the silver-padded feet of many lynxes.
The animals threw their weights against their breastbands on the instant, crouching low to the snow, and digging in their claws. And so, running, man and dogs dipped over the bank and down to the frozen bed of the Yukon, and in the gray light were gone. Tenderfeet. Old-timers. Muc-luc: a water-tight, Eskimo boot, made from walrus-hide and trimmed with fur.
Another native spoke: "'It is very stormy this month, they say. 'The waves would sink an open boat." "Then they can put us across in bidarkas," insisted Emerson, who had noted the presence of several of these smaller crafts, which are nothing more than long walrus-hide canoes completely decked over, save for tiny cockpits wherein the paddlers sit.
I dug a passage in the ground two feet wide, two deep, and ten long, with perpendicular sides, and at its north end a circular space, twelve feet across, also with perpendicular sides, which I lined with stones; the whole excavation I covered with inch-thick walrus-hide, skinned during a whole bitter week from four of a number that lay about the shore-ice; for ridge-pole I used a thin pointed rock which I found near, though, even so, the roof remained nearly flat.
The big, wolfish creatures loved him and they feared him. He almost never had to use the long walrus-hide whip. They obeyed him on the instant without hesitation "Ooisht," and they pulled in the harness as one; "Aw," and they stopped. There was a power in his voice that governed them like magic.
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