Note 23 — Chapter VII

When several are hunting in company, there are fixed rules to determine to whom the game belongs. If two or more shoot at a reindeer, the animal belongs to him who first hit it, even if he only wounded it slightly. As to the rules for seal-hunting, Dalager says: ‘If a Greenlander strikes a seal or other marine animal with his light dart, and it is not killed, but gets away with the dart, and if another then comes and kills it with his darts, it nevertheless belongs to the first; but if he has used the ordinary harpoon, and the line breaks, and another comes and kills the animal, the first has lost his right to it. If, however, they both throw at the same time and both harpoons strike, the animal is cut lengthwise in two, and divided between them, skin and all.’ ‘If two throw at a bird simultaneously, it is divided between them.’ ‘If a dead seal is found with a harpoon fixed in it, if the owner of the harpoon is known in the neighbourhood, he gets his weapon back, but the finder keeps the seal.’ Similar rules seem also to be in force upon the east coast.