If you could look down at the world from high above the North Pole,
this is what you would see--an icy ocean with land almost all around
it. The brown-skinned people who have lived along this shore for many
hundreds of years are Eskimos.
[Illustration: ~a harpoon~]
When white men first met the Eskimos, they were surprised by several
things. The Eskimos never used salt. They lived on nothing but meat and
fish and water. And they were the most cheerful people in the world. An
Eskimo laughed more in a day than anyone else did in a week.
Nobody knows exactly where these laughing people came from but many
scientists think they traveled across from Siberia into Alaska, just
as their cousins the Indians did. Nobody knows why they decided to
stay there near the top of the world. But we do know that Eskimos like
the country where they live. They settled along the shore of the ocean
where they could find both sea and land animals to eat. The weather
there was not as cold as it was farther inland or even in some parts of
the United States.
Long ago Eskimos invented wonderful ways of getting food and of staying
warm. They trained dogs to pull their sleds. They learned to find their
way home over great fields of drifted snow, even in the dark night.
They knew exactly what to do in order to live and have a good time.
[Illustration: ~Papik with his fish spear~]
The Eskimo people found different ways of living in different parts of
the Arctic country. But everywhere they had many of the same customs.
Some groups settled near forests, and they used wood in their tools and
for building igloos. (_Igloo_ is the Eskimo word for house, no matter
what it is made of.) Other groups had no trees, so they made skin tents
for summer and snow houses for winter, and they used bone and ivory
for tools. One group lived where they could find chunks of pure copper
which they made into tools. A very few learned to make tools from the
iron in meteorites. (A meteorite is a shooting star that has landed on
the earth.)
[Illustration: ~a salmon hook~]