No tools are used for this purpose except a knife. I have seen a small
jackknife used for cutting the fine seal skin lines. The workman takes
a wet skin from which the hair and epidermis have been removed and
sits down cross-legged on the ground with somebody else to hold the
skin stretched for him. Then holding the knife vertically up with the
edge away from him, he starts at one corner of the skin and cuts a
narrow strip in one continuous piece, going round and round the skin,
gathering and stretching the strip with the left hand. They do this
work quite rapidly and with great skill, cutting single lines upward
of 90 feet long and only one-eighth inch in diameter, almost perfectly
even. These fine lines of seal-skin thong, which serve a great variety
of purposes, are usually made when they are in the summer camps,
before the breaking up of the ice. They are dried by stretching them
between stakes 6 inches or a foot high, driven into the ground.
The stout thongs of the hide of the bearded seal, walrus, or beluga
are usually made in the winter and stretched to dry between posts of
whales’ bones set up in the village, about breast high. While they are
drying, the maker carefully trims and scrapes the edges with his
knife, so as to make an almost round line.[N413] The usual diameter is
about 0.3 inch. These lines are not always made with such care, being
often merely flat thongs. Fine deer-skin twine, or “babiche,” as it is
called by the voyageurs, for making the nettings of snow shoes, is
made in the same way. A deer skin is dampened, rolled up, and put up
over the lamp for a day or two to remove the hair by sweating, and
then cut into a single long piece of fine thong.
[Footnote N413: Gilder describes a similar process of
manufacturing these lines at Hudson’s Bay. (Schwatka’s Search,
p. 176.)]
All the men do not appear able to do this fine work. For instance, our
friend Mû´ñialu had the babiche for his new snowshoes made by his
house-mate, the younger Tuñazu. When it is desired to fasten together
two pieces of the stouter kinds of thong, what I have so often
referred to as the “double-slit splice” is generally employed. This is
made as follows: The two ends to be joined together are each slit
lengthwise, and one is passed through the slit in the other. The other
end of this piece is then passed through the slit in the first piece,
and drawn through so that the sides of each slit interlace like the
loops of a square knot (see diagrams, Fig. 302). The splice is often
further secured by a seizing of sinew braid. Most writers on the
Eskimo have not gone sufficiently into the details of their arts to
describe their methods of splicing. One writer,[N414] however, in
describing some Eskimo implements from East Greenland, describes and
figures several splices somewhat of this nature, and one in particular
especially complicated by crossing the sides of the slits and passing
the end through several times. This method of uniting thongs is
probably very general among the Eskimo and is also common enough among
civilized people.
[Footnote N414: W. J. Sollas, in Jour. Anthrop. Inst. of Great
Britain and Ireland, vol. 9, pp. 329-336.]
[Illustration: FIG. 302.--Double-slit splice for rawhide lines.]