Seasons of the Eskimo, a vanishing way of live.

Bruemmer Fred

Published by McClelland and Stewart, softcover, illustrated.


In the beginning, man was a hunter, "a cunning hunter" as the Bible says of Esau. For all but a tiny fraction of the more than a million years since man emerged as a hunting hominid on the African veld, his existence has been ruled and his character stamped by the iron law that nature has laid down for all predators: to live they must kill.

A tundra wolf must kill at least sixteen caribou a year in order to survive. An inland Eskimo had to kill two hundred caribou annually to keep himself, his family, and his dogs alive.

As a predator, man is poorly equipped by nature. He Jacks fangs and claws. Most prey animals are faster than he. For success in hunting, early man depended on his ability to think and plan, on the crude weapons he fashioned, wooden clubs and roughly chipped pebbles, and on organized co-operation with the other men in his small hunting group.

Like other predators, man had to live in balance with his prey. If he became too successful and diminished the game, hunting became more precarious and his numbers declined until the balance had been re-established. It was a hard and risky existence, and scientists estimate early man had a lifespan of only about twenty-five years.

Not until he developed agriculture, some ten thousand years ago, was man freed from the constant pressure to hunt for meat. Only then could his numbers increase rapidly. Nature lost her control over him and he bent her laws to his will, though not always to his ultimate advantage. The population of the hunting people of the harsh but game-rich North American Arctic was about one person per 250 square miles before the advent of white man. (In Holland now the population density is more than nine hundred people per square mile.)

In the United States today eight percent of the people produce more than enough food to feed themselves and the other ninety-two percent of the population, to whom food is simply something they acquire by walking to the nearest supermarket. In primitive hunting societies, the need to procure food required the incessant effort of all the men, and even then, in a life dependent upon the vagaries of weather and game, the fear of famine was never far.

If the life of the hunter was hard, with an ample measure of danger and despair, it had its compensations. His was, essentially, an egalitarian society in which a man's worth was judged by his wisdom and his skill as a hunter. Material possessions, apart from a few essential tools and weapons, were a hindrance rather than an asset to a people who had to migrate frequently in order to make maximum use of game available.

The ethnologist Diamond Jenness tells of an acquisitive Eskimo on Victoria Island who had amassed so many goods his dogs could barely move the loaded sled. Had he not numbered among his possessions several sturdy wives, admirably suited to hauling, he would not have been able to make the vita) migrations.

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