Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/16

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the half-grown young she could carry, staying her appetite meanwhile with such raw eggs as could be found. Another woman was busy at the characteristic occupation of baling, for all Fuegian canoes leak, not being dugouts, but made of the roughest of native-hewn slabs lashed together with tough vines or rootlets and caulked with mosses. A third woman and a child seemed to be warming food over a fire and incidentally warming their own nearly naked bodies. The party had no knives and borrowed one of ours to cut up their meat.

Their backs were partly protected by guanaco skins, tied around their necks with the hair side out. These primitive capes were not otherwise fastened and, when the hands were in use, left the body quite exposed to the wind. None of the canoe Indians that we saw had more clothing, except in a few cases where they used portions of cast-off sailor clothes, and none fastened their fur capes about the body with so much as a string.

There is always a low fire burning on a bed of earth in the bottom of the Fuegian canoe wherever it may be met with, making possible the serving en route of smoked cormorant and baked mussels, but the indications did not always point to that use of the fire, some of the food at least being eaten raw. It is doubtless necessary for these wandering shellfish gatherers to maintain a permanent camp fire; to light it anew on their rain-saturated shores must tax their ingenuity to the utmost. A careful search of the canoes revealed neither flint nor matches, and the Fuegian has no pockets. This was our first meeting with the canoe Indians. Later we encountered them among the western channels, but never more than two canoes could carry. They were always eager to come aboard the ship and to trade their bone-pointed spears, bows and