Far away in the sub-arctic, the sturdy Eskimos live happily—hunting and fishing for food, trapping for furs to trade for clothing, ammunition and for such luxuries as tea, sugar, tobacco and jam. They speak only their own language, and their idea of quantities or numbers is always very hazy. Some tribes do not seem to be able to count more than ten.
But their remarkable intelligence offsets this weakness.
One year I told an Eskimo, who hunted two hundred miles north of one of our stations, to report to me, the next summer, how many sea trout he had caught that spring at the mouth of a certain river where we thought of establishing an outpost.
The native borrowed a pencil and a sheet of paper from the trader and departed. The next year he brought in the paper, very much soiled, but showing exactly how many fish he had killed—1132. For each trout the Eskimo had drawn a line, varying in length according to the size of the fish, and for each ten trout he had scrawled a double line. Nobody had ever taught him that.