Schwatka's Search: Sledging in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin Records Part 20

They have little idea of numbers beyond the number of their fingers, and such as they can borrow by calling attention to their neighbors'

fingers. Any sum that calls for more than that is to them amasuet (many) or amasuadelo (a great many).

NO IDEA OF LENGTH OF YEARS.

It is not at all singular, then, that they have no idea of their ages when they get beyond the number of years that the mother can keep upon one of the wooden or ivory b.u.t.tons that hold her belt in place. It is impossible, therefore, to tell whether they are a long-lived race.

There are many among them who bear the marks of advanced age, but such may have resulted more from hards.h.i.+ps and exposure than from the acc.u.mulation of years. There is a gray-haired old dame with the Iwillik tribe at Depot Island who was a grown woman at the time of Sir William Edward Parry's visit there in 1821, and remembers the circ.u.mstances with all the distinctness that marks the early reminiscences of the old in every country. There was another woman there apparently as old, but there was no early event by which her age could be traced except that she told 'The Herald' correspondent that she remembered having seen Parry on board of a s.h.i.+p in Baffin's Bay when she was a little girl.