Chukches from parting with the heads of the seal,
though, in order to ascertain the species existing here, we offered
a high price for them "Irgatti" (to-morrow), or "Isgatti," if the
promise was given by a woman, was the usual answer. But the promise
was never kept. At last a boy came and gave us a skull, which he
said belonged to a seal. On a more minute examination, however, it
was found not to have belonged to a seal, but to an old dog, whose
head it was evidently thought might, without any damage to the
hunting, be handed over to the white magicians. This time it went
worse with the counterfeitor than in the case of the ptarmigan
bargain. For a couple of my comrades undertook to make the boy
ashamed in the presence of the other Chukches, saying with a laugh
"that he, a Chukch, must have been very stupid to commit such a
mistake," and it actually appeared as if the scoff had in this case
fallen into good ground. Another time, while I was in my watch in
the ice-house, there came a native to me and informed me that he had
driven a man from Irgunnuk to the vessel, but that the man had not
paid him, and asked me on that account to give him a box of matches.
When I replied that he must have been already well paid on the
vessel for his drive, he said in a whining tone, "only a very little
piece of bread." He was not the least embarrassed when I only
laughed at the, as I well knew, untruthful statement, and did not
give him what he asked.

The Chukches commonly live in monogamy; it is only exceptionally
that they have two wives, as was the case with Chepurin, who has
been already mentioned. It appeared as if the wives were faithful to
their husbands. It was only seldom that cases occurred in which
women, either in jest or earnest, gave out that they wished a white
man as a lover. A woman not exactly eminent for beauty or
cleanliness said, for instance, on one occasion, that she had had
two children by Chukches, and now she wished to have a third by one
of the ship's folk. The young women were modest, often very pretty,
and evidently felt the same necessity of attracting attention by
small coquettish artifices as Eve's daughters of European race. We
may also understand their peculiar pronunciation of the language as
an expression of feminine coquetry. For when they wish to be
attractive they replace the man's _r_-sound with a soft _s_; thus,
_korang_ (reindeer) is pronounced by the women _kosang_, _tirkir_ (the
sun) _tisk