5. _Customs, Daily Life and Habits._--The accompanying figure is from a carving made of a piece of walrus tusk and represents incidents in the life of an Alaskan native. The special purport of some of the characters and etchings is not apparent.
[Illustration: FIG. 116.--Ivory carving with records, Alaska; after Mallery.]
1. A native with his left hand resting against a house. To the right is a "shaman stick" surmounted by the emblem of a bird, a "good spirit," in memory of some departed friend (? of his wife). 2. A reindeer. 3. One man, the recorder, shot and killed another with an arrow. 4. A trading expedition with a dog sledge. 5. Is a sail boat, although the elevated paddle signifies that that was the manner in which the voyage was best made. 6. A dog-sled with the animal hitched up for a journey. Above is the sun. 7. A sacred lodge. The four figures at the outer corners of the square represent the young men placed on guard armed with bows and arrows, to keep away the uninitiated. Inside are the members of the band dancing; the fire-place is in the centre. The angled lines extending from the right side of the lodge to the partition line are a plan of the subterranean entrance to the lodge. 8. A pine tree, up which a porcupine is climbing. 9. A pine tree, from which a woodpecker is extracting larvæ for food. 10. A bear. 11. The recorder in his boat, holding aloft his double-bladed paddle to drive fish into a net. 12. An assistant fisherman driving fish into the net. 13. The net.
The figure over the man (No. 12) represents a whale, with harpoon and line attached, caught by the narrator.
6. _Historical._--Colonel Mallery says: "It is very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish in pictographs, or indeed orally, between historical and traditional accounts obtained from Indians.... The winter counts, while having their chief value as calendars, contain some material that is absolute and veritable tribal history."
7. _Biographic._--Pictographs are very common either of a continuous account of the chief events in the life of the subject of the sketch, or of separate accounts of some particular exploit or event in the life of the person referred to.
In this and in another memoir[117] Colonel Mallery calls attention to the fact that it is necessary to distinguish between different kinds of pictorial signs, but this becomes more difficult when the characters have become conventionalised. They may be classified under--1. Pictorial Signs; 2. Emblems; 3. Symbols.