250 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

as, in general, abuse and insult are the only return for the loss which is
sustained” 3,

The author then goes on to relate how some men cut off their hair and
greased their ears before the struggle, in order to put their opponents to as
great a disadvantage as possible, since most of the wrestling consisted in the
hauling one another by the hair till one was overpowered and brought to the
ground. He also remarks that, on such occasions, when an evidently weaker
party was unwilling to give up the contest out of fear of losing his wife,
his very relatives would advise him to do so lest he might get hurt. He then
grows pathetic at the remembrance of some of the scenes he has witnessed.
“It was very often’, he writes, “very unpleasant to me, to see the object of
the contest sitting in pensive silence watching her fate, while her husband
and his rival were contending for the prize. I have indeed not only felt pity
for those poor wretched victims, but the utmost indignation, when I have seen
them won, perhaps, by a man whom they mortally hated. On those occasions
their grief and reluctance to follow their new lord has been so great, that
the business has often ended in the greatest brutality; for, in the struggle,
I have seen the poor girls stripped quite naked, and carried by main force
to their new lodgings” .

Hearne furthermore makes it very clear that these public struggles were
not exceptions, but rather the rule, when he writes that “whenever any con-
siderable number of them were in company, scarcely a day passed without
some overtures being made for contests of this kind” ’.

And these had not always for their objects women already possessed
by others. For instance the young woman found alone in the wilderness by
Hearne’s companions being quite comely, she was immediately the occasion
of a lively struggle between the members of his party, “and the poor girl
was actually won and lost at wrestling by near half a score different men
the same evening” ¢.

After the foregoing it will be easily understood why the eastern Déné
youths are “upon all occasions, from their childhood, trying their strength
and skill in wrestling’, after the manner of the young Tatars of the great
Asiatic plains®, and of the Koraks of eastern Siberia °.

' Op. cit., pp. 104—105.

* [bid., p. 107.

> [bid., p. 106,

“ Tbid., p. 265.

5 <7] nous fit remarquer ca et 1a dans le lointain des enfants qui jouaient 4 la lutte.
C’est l’exercice favori de tous les habitants de notre pays de Efe, nous disait-il; chez nous on
n’estime que deux choses dans un homme, savoir bien aller a cheval et ¢tre fort a la lutte”
(Huc, Souvenirs d'un Voyage dans la Tartarie, vol. 1, p. 119).

° Who similarly clutch one another by the hair (Bush, “Reindeer”, &c., p. 360).