Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/705

Rh Both, kinds of boats are always drawn up out of the water, except when in actual use, and the kayaks, like the umiaks, are always stripped for the winter.

In summer the men often make quite long excursions across the country after reindeer, traveling mostly on the lakes and ponds, crossing from lake to lake with, the kayak carried on one arm, which, is thrust into the hole up to the elbow, with the hand grasping the frame inside. The trading-parties that go east in the spring start before there is any open water along the shore at Point Barrow, and travel along the level shore-ice with the umiak lashed to a flat sled drawn by the dogs and all the men and women. Tent, kayaks, and all the baggage of the party are loaded into the umiak, and so they travel on till, in about two days' journey from the Point, they find the open water which, has come down from the great rivers. Then they land the sledges, to be picked up on their return in the autumn, launch their boats, and proceed on their journey by water.

The umiaks are first launched about the middle or end of April, when they are dragged on sledges out over the ice to the off-shore open water for the spring whaling. They are constantly in use from that time, whenever the ice will permit, till well into October. The kayaks are seldom brought out till the ponds are free of ice—about the 1st of July—but the middle of October generally sees all boats of both kinds laid away for the season.



N an unprejudiced view of the matter, we may well be surprised that a barbarity so foreign to the aspiring tendencies of our age as the destruction of birds should continue; that exhortations to protect them are still necessary; and that active harboring and care of them are not matters of course. There are special causes for the lamentable existing conditions, but a wide survey is necessary to the full understanding of them. If we seek for the causes of the lessening numbers of our wild birds, including the finest and favorite singers, we shall find that they are many and interwoven. Foremost among them are the conditions of modern cultivation. When denudation is the rule in forestry, and the whole growth is cut away with all the old and hollow trees and those that were rich in knot-holes; when agriculture, making the smallest spot of ground productive, roots out stumps and hedgerows, dries up the swamps, drains the larger ponds, and 