Long description
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. LITTLE BOREAS'S PLAYTHINGS. VTOW that you know all about little ' Boreas's home, let us find out what he has been doing. We left him rolling about on the reindeer skins of the snow bed, in a house built of snow, where it must nearly always be below freezing to prevent the house from melting down. Well, as the Eskimo must sometime be babies, so the dogs must at sometime be puppies, and the puppies are allowed inside the igloo on the bed, where theyare the favorite playthings of the young heir. His mother makes him a number of doll dog-harnesses for the puppies, fixes him up a dog-whip almost like his father's, and then he amuses himself harnessing . them, hitching them to a hatchet, the water-bucket, or any object that is at hand, and driving them around in the igloo and storm igloo, or out of doors, when the weather is very pleasant. By this time, of course, little Boreas is able to walk, and he has a nice suit of clothes for outdoor wear, made of the softest skins of the reindeer fawns, trimmed with rabbit and eider-duck skin. As soon as the puppies get a little bigger, the larger boys take them in hand, and by the time they are old enough to be used for work in thesledges, they are almost well-trained dogs without knowing just when their schooling commenced. And so with little Boreas; when he gets older he takes the dogs his younger brother finds unmanageable and trains them, and by the time he is a young man, he is a good dog-driver, and knows how to manage a sledge under all circumstances. This is the hardest thing that an Eskimo has to learn. I have known white men to equal them in rowing in their little seal-skin canoes; I have seen white men build good igloos; but I have never seen a white man who was a good dog-driver; and the Eskimo told m...