Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/237

Rh the same stuff as the men's water-proof boots. The men sometimes wear pantaloons like the women, and the boys all do till they arrive at manhood and have their lips pierced for the labrets. The boys wear jackets like the men's, but the little girls' dress is a perfect miniature of the women's, even to the pocket at the back of the neck for the baby's head. Indeed, the larger girls sometimes do duty as nurses, and carry round their little sisters in their jackets like grown women.

The usual material for jackets is reindeer-skin, prepared without any process of tanning. The skin is first dried in the sun, and then the stiff under membrane is carefully scraped off with a very effective tool made of a small piece of flint chipped into a blunt blade, and fitted into a handle of ivory or wood, shaped so as to fit exactly into the hollow of the hand. This scraping also serves to soften the skin, just as you soften a sheet of stiff paper by rubbing it up, and the skin is finally finished off by rubbing it with pumice-stone and gypsum or chalk. When the skin is finished the inside looks and feels like white wash-leather, but, of course, is easily spoiled by wetting. All sorts of skins that are to be used with the hair on are dressed in this way.

To make a frock of ordinary thickness, they usually select the skins of does in their summer coat, one for the front and one for the back, and put them together so that the best part of the skin, on the back of the animal, comes on the front and back of the person where it will show, while the poorer skin from the belly is concealed under the arms or the sides. The head of one skin is made into the hood by fitting it in with seams. All these garments are made on regular patterns, just as our clothes are; all jackets, for instance, having practically the same number of pieces. To make the frock fit round the neck, there is a curved triangular piece let in on each side of the throat, and these throat-pieces are always made of the white skin from the belly of the deer, no matter what is the color of the rest of the garment. This gives a very pretty effect to the frock.

Heavy frocks for very cold weather, especially for wear when out on the ice seal-hunting, are made of skins of deer in the thick gray winter coat. Now and then you see a frock made of the Alaskan variety of the mountain sheep, which is of a pale buff color, almost white. Full-dress frocks are also made of the white or variegated white and brown skins of the tame Siberian reindeer, which they get by trading from the Eskimos whom they meet in the summer at the mouth of the Colville River. The latter get them from Kotzebue Sound, whither they are brought from Asia across Bering Strait. These skins are highly prized.

There was one old fellow at Cape Smyth who was a very great