ng but troublesome ailment such as
earache or neuralgia, which the sufferer imagines to be incurable.[64]
And a request of this kind must be obeyed, or if not lifelong misfortune
will attend the man who has refused to fire the fatal shot. Women,
however, are never put to death, nor, so far as I could glean, do they
ever want to be. The origin of this custom is probably due to the barren
nature of this land where every mouthful of food is precious, and where
a man must literally work to live.

[Footnote 64: Mr. Waldemar Bogoras, the Russian naturalist, writes as
follows in _Harper's Magazine_ of April 1903: "One of the attendants I
had with me for two years while in the Kolyma country belonged to a
family with a tradition of this kind. He was a man of fifty, and the
father and elder brothers had already followed in the way of their
ancestors [by the _Kamitok_]. One time, while stricken with a violent
fever, instead of taking the medicine that I gave him, he inquired
anxiously if I were sure that he would recover at all, otherwise he felt
bound to send for his son and ask for the last stroke."--"A Strange
People of the North," by Waldemar Bogoras, _Harper's Magazine_, April
1903.]

That the _Kamitok_ also exists amongst the Eskimo of Alaska is shown by
the following anecdote. Captain Healy, of the Revenue cutter _Thetis_,
told me that he once inquired of a native near Point Barrow whether one
Charlie he had known the previous year was still alive and in good
health.

"Oh no," was the reply, "Charlie dead, I shot him."

"Shot him?" said Healy, taken aback. "What did you do that for?"

"Oh, poor Charlie sick, pains all over, he asked me shoot him, so I shot
him with his own gun and kept it afterwards!"

The Tchuktchis are by no means an idle race, and whenever I entered a
hut I invariably found even the youngest inmates usefully employed; the
women busily engaged cooking and sewing, or cleaning and polishing
firearms, while the men were away duck-shooting or hunting the seal or
walrus. Sometimes we went seal-hunting with our friends, but this is
poor sport, especially in damp, chilly weather. The outfit is very
simple, consisting of a rifle, snowshoes and spear. A start is made at
daylight until a likely-looking hole in the ice is reached, and here you
sit down and wait patiently, perhaps for hours, until a seal's head
appears above water, which it frequently fails to do. In warm weather
this might be an agreeable oc