Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [160]
In their range of hunting strategies, the Inuit were the most flexible and sophisticated hunters in Arctic history. Besides killing caribou, walruses, and land birds in ways not unlike those of the Norse, the Inuit differed from the Norse in using their fast kayaks to harpoon seals and to run down seabirds on the ocean, and in using umiaqs and harpoons to kill whales in open waters. Not even an Inuit can stab to death at one blow a healthy whale, so the whale hunt began with a hunter harpooning the whale from an umiaq rowed by other men. That is not an easy task, as all you devotees of Sherlock Holmes stories may remember from the “Adventure of Black Peter,” in which an evil retired ship’s captain is found dead in his house, with a harpoon that had been decorating his wall thrust clean through him. After spending a morning at a butcher’s shop, vainly attempting himself to drive a harpoon through a pig’s carcass, Sherlock Holmes deduces correctly that the murderer must have been a professional harpooner, because an untrained man no matter how strong cannot drive in a harpoon deeply. Two things made that possible for the Inuit: the harpoon’s spear-thrower grip that extended the throwing arc and hence increased the hunter’s throwing force and the impact; and, as in the case of Black Peter’s murderer, long practice. For the Inuit, though, that practice began already in childhood, resulting in Inuit men developing a condition called hyperextension of the throwing arm: in effect, an additional built-in spear-thrower.
Once the harpoon head became embedded in the whale, the cleverly designed toggle connection released, allowing the hunters to retrieve the harpoon shaft now separated from the harpoon head embedded in the whale. Otherwise, if the harpooner had continued to hold a rope tied to the harpoon head and shaft, the angry whale would have dragged underwater the umiaq and all its Inuit occupants. Left attached to the harpoon head was an air-filled bladder of sealskin, whose buoyancy forced the whale to work harder against the bladder’s resistance and to grow tired as it dived. When the whale surfaced to breathe, the Inuit launched another harpoon with yet another bladder attached, to tire the whale even more. Only when the whale had thus become exhausted did the hunters dare bring the umiaq alongside the beast to lance it to death.
The Inuit also devised a specialized technique for hunting ringed seal, the most abundant seal species in Greenland waters but one whose habits made it difficult to capture. Unlike other Greenland seal species, the ringed seal winters off the Greenland coast under the ice, by opening breathing holes through the ice just large enough for its head (but not for its body). The holes are difficult to spot because the seal leaves them covered with a cone of snow. Each seal has several breathing holes, just as a fox makes an underground burrow with several foxholes as alternate entrances. A hunter could not knock the snow cone off the hole, else the seal would realize that someone was waiting for it. Hence the hunter stood patiently next to a cone in the cold darkness of the Arctic winter, waited motionless for as many hours as necessary to hear a seal arrive to catch a quick breath, and then tried to harpoon the animal through the snow cone, without being able to see it. As the impaled seal swam off, the harpoon head then detached from the shaft but remained attached to a rope, which the hunter played out and pulled until the seal became