r
construction are stored all the personal belongings likely to be of
use. The spirits of these latter are set free, either by having holes
bored in them or some part of them broken or removed, so that thus
being rendered useless to the living, they suffer what in the Eskimo
mind corresponds to the death of inanimate objects.

Kaiachououk was so convinced of the reality of the spirit world, and
so heart-broken at his utter inability to bring back to life the one
he had loved so well, that now nothing would satisfy his mind but that
in order to continue the communion which had been so sweet to him on
earth, he should be treated exactly as his lost wife, and be
immediately buried alongside her on some point of vantage.

At first his followers were inclined to treat his injunctions as mere
vapourings, but they finally realized that the man was in deadly
earnest, and were eventually compelled to comply with his wishes. The
day being set, he was accordingly dressed in his finest garments, and,
his dead wife being duly caparisoned and walled in in the customary
manner, Kaiachououk, laid out on the rock beside her, was treated in
an exactly similar fashion. There was no apparent alteration of the
chief's attitude of mind as they proceeded with the walling up, and
the heavy slabs were already being laid over him when two of the
largest happened to become lodged on his chest. For a short time he
made no sign and offered no kind of resistance; but it was gradually
forced upon him that this method of translation into other worlds was
far from being as easy as he had been inclined to suppose.
Consequently, before the cortege had broken up and his last friends
departed, he was loudly appealing to them to return and release him.

He was never known afterwards to refer to the incident; but on the
whole it had an excellent effect on the Innuits; and they realized, so
far as their unimpressionable natures are capable of doing, the strong
domestic affection for his wife which was one of their chief's
pre-eminent sources of greatness.

On this particular fall, when the last drama in Kaiachououk's life was
played, when the northern lights sent their many-coloured banners
floating over the heavens, and the stars looked so large and shining
that it seemed one must surely touch them from the tops of the high
hills, he was camping with his family and two or three others on a
small ledge at the foot of the mighty Kiglapeit (shining top)
Mo