January 1953 25 Eskimo Notes June! Point Barrow, Alaska Talks about or has claimed to have encountered first hand. I think that by merely reading the book a fast talker could become quite an authority on the subject of the Arctic slope. Brower arrived here in 1887 and holds first claim on having lived with many of the groups of eskimo. Their most of the things he ran into were without precedent in other peoples experi- ences certainly not in that of people he had met. The talk here says the book glosses over a lot of things, and doesn't even mention the thriving bootleg business that Charlie ran for some time. I guess there's a good deal of room here for a biographer. There is a lot of source material and plenty of Brower's contemporaries still in the village. However, the task isn't quite along my line of endeavor. I just happened to think that in comparing the middle east to the arctic I failed to men- tion one of the greatest contrasts - the total absence of flies. The odors of the village incidentally, haven't changed in centuries for where the old igloos are washing into the sea the same smell is strong in the cross section of an ancient rubbish heap. Part of this I discover is a characteristic of the tundra itself, for where it has thawed