There are millions of birds called “auks” which fly so low and so thick over the land that the Eskimos catch them with a net as you would catch butterflies. They can catch enough to last them for many months, and as all out-of-doors is a refrigerator the birds that are caught can be kept on ice without having the ice man call every day. Eskimos use the auk’s soft feathers to line their clothes to keep themselves warm and comfortable, for the thermometer sometimes goes to seventy de-grees below zero. Another bird, the eider-duck, has still softer feathers. They are called “down.” Eider-down is one of the softest and lightest things imaginable and makes the best filling for bed quilts, as it is both light and warm. Eskimos eat the eider-duck's eggs, too, and they gather thousands of them at a time.

Instead of beef, the Eskimo eats the flesh of an animal called the musk-ox. The musk-ox has hooklike horns and a shaggy long-haired coat to keep himself warm in the terrible cold. His coat makes him look big, but when he is killed and the coat removed, there is only a poor little lean animal left inside.

There is another animal which the Eskimo hunts. It lives both in the water and on the land and has tusks like an elephant. It is called a walrus. It is also caught for meat, but chiefly for its ivory tusks, which are two big teeth that hang far down out of its mouth.

What the Eskimo likes best to eat, however, is not lean meat but fat. A big, greasy strip of fat to him is as delicious as a banana to us. Fat food keeps people warm, and nature in its wonderful way makes fat taste good to the Eskimo because it makes him warm. People in warm countries don’t like fat food because it would make them warm when they want to be cool.

One of the most valuable furs that ladies wear is made from the coat of the seal, another animal that lives both in the water and on the ice. The Eskimo uses the sealskin to make his tents in which he lives in the summertime.