My Life With the Eskimo Quotes

“it does not profit a man that he gain the whole world if he lose his own soul,”
― Vilhjálmur Stefánsson, My Life with the Eskimo

“I must not give the impression that we were really starving, or even suffering much from hunger. We had plenty of seal-oil — a sealskin bag full of it — and of this we ate all we wanted. All of us found, however, that we could not take much of it "straight" — the stomach needs bulky food; it craves to be filled with something. For this reason we used to eat the oil soaked up in tea leaves, ptarmigan feathers,, or caribou hair. Most commonly we used to take long-haired caribou skin, cut it in small pieces, dip the pieces in oil, and eat them that way.”
― Vilhjálmur Stefánsson, My Life with the Eskimo

“Shooting buffalo for their hides and for sport destroyed them a few years before they would have had to go anyway; but the shooting of the caribou for the same reasons cannot be similarly extenuated, for had no more been killed than were needed for food and clothing for the population of the country itself, they would have lasted indefinitely, and would have been forever an economic resource not only for the Eskimo but for the country at large.”
― Vilhjálmur Stefánsson, My Life with the Eskimo