Neil Cohen, age 14, of Philadelphia, Pa., for his question:
HOW DO ESKIMOS BUILD THEIR IGLOOS?
Nowadays the Eskimo people live in towns and settlements in ordinary everyday homes fitted with electricity. Most of them work for wages, feed on store bought foods and wear store bought clothes. Some are talented artists and make a living from handicrafts, from carvings and pictures of wildlife in their Arctic homeland.
Igloo building went out of style early in the century, when the Eskimos gave up their former lifestyle in favor of modern communities. Previously most of them had built shelters of clods or animal skins where they spent the short, coolish summers and snow house igloos to protect themselves during the bitter winters.
No doubt most of the younger generations have forgotten how to build a traditional igloo. But many old timers remember and sometimes build one on a hunting trip or perhaps just for fun. Their ancestors did the job with a long straight blade made of bone, called a snow knife. First they cut blocks of hard frozen snow, measuring about 3 feet long, 1 1/2 feet wide and 5 or 6 inches thick.
The blocks were stacked in a spiraling wall, winding up from the ground in smaller and still smaller circles. The main part of the work was finished when the snow building blocks formed a dome with a small ventilating hole in the top. More blocks were used to line the inside wall ledges for sitting and sleeping. The floor and these ledges were carpeted with furs and skins.
Other ledges were added for cooking pots, tools and utensils. The oil burning heater and cooking range was a simple bowl carved from' soft soapstone. There were no windows, and a crawl tunnel made from more snow blocks led to the low doorway. Often a couple of storage rooms were added on the sides of the tunnel. It is claimed that an Eskimo could build a family igloo in about two hours.
In olden times the Eskimos were Arctic wanderers, and usually their homes were temporary quarters. Their summer homes were tents made of skins anchored down with stones. More permanent summer residences were made from grassy clods, shaped like domes with windows and a doorway minus a tunnel. All this is ancient history, though no doubt some still retain fond dreams of the so called good old days.