Note 153 — Chapter XII · INNUIT LIFE AND LAND.

The oil obtained from the beluga and the large seal (mahklok) is a very important article of trade between the lowland people and those of the mountains, the latter depending upon it entirely for lighting their semi-subterranean dwellings during the winter, and to supplement their scanty stores of food. It is manufactured by a very simple process. Huge drift-logs are fashioned into troughs much in the same manner as the Thlinket tribes make their wooden canoes. Into these troughs filled with water the blubber is thrown in lumps of from two to five pounds in weight. Then a large number of smooth cobble-stones are thrown into a fire until they are thoroughly heated, when they are picked up with sticks fashioned for the purpose and deposited in the water, which boils up at once. After a few minutes these stones must be removed and replaced by fresh ones, this laborious process being continued until all oil has been boiled out of the blubber and floats on the surface, when it is removed with flat pieces of bone or roughly fashioned ladles, and decanted into bladders or whole seal-skins, then cached on pole-frames until sold or used by the makers.