It is in these leads of open water that the whales work their way to their unknown breeding grounds in the northeast, passing by Point Barrow chiefly during the months of May and June, and it is during this season of migration that they are hunted by the Eskimos.
The chase of the whale is of great importance to these people. The capture of one of these monsters means meat in abundance; blubber for the lamps, and for trade with the Eskimos whom they meet in the summer; whalebone to purchase ammunition; tools and luxuries from the ships; and the choicest morsel that an Eskimo knows, the "black-skin" or epidermis of the whale. Consequently, the successful whaleman is the best man in the village, and soon grows rich and influential.
But to return to the seal-hunters and their observations of the ice. From long experience, the Eskimos are able to judge pretty accurately where the "leads" will first open in the spring, and, when they have concluded where the boats will be launched, they set to work to select the best path for dragging out the boats through the rough ice-field. They soon make a regular beaten trail, winding in and out among the hummocks, taking advantage of all the smooth fields of ice that they can, and, from time to time as they pass back and forth from their seal-nets, they chip off projecting corners of ice with their ice-picks, and with the same implement widen out the narrow defiles in the road, and smooth off the roughest places. Men sometimes go out on purpose to work for a few hours on the road, using ice-picks or "whale-spades" (something like a heavy, broad chisel, mounted on a long pole, used for cutting the blubber off a whale), which they have obtained from the white men. It is a pretty rough path, however, at the best.
By the middle of April all the hunters have returned from the winter deer-hunt, and the business of getting ready for whaling is taken seriously in hand. The frames of the great skin boats must be taken down from the scaffolds where they have rested all winter, and carefully overhauled and repaired, while every article of wood that will be used in whaling, from the timbers of the boat to the shafts of the spears and harpoons, must be scraped perfectly clean, in honor of the noble quarry. Gear must be looked to, and the skin covers for the boats repaired and soaked in the sea, through holes in the ice cut close to the shore, till they are soft enough to stretch over the framework.
Meanwhile, a careful watch is kept from the village cliff for the dark cloud to seaward which indicates open water; and if the much-talked-of east wind does not speedily begin to blow, the most skillful of the wizards or medicine-men get out on the bluff,
