At the end of March every year, two-thirds of the Eskimo will leave home to begin their whale hunting journey to store food for the upcoming long winter. The hunter team consisted of nearly all healthy men in the village and some women following the logistic service. The Eskimo hunter team will go to the most common whale areas in Alaska and the Hope bay and find a convenient location to set up a camp to start a long hunt. Hunters are divided into small groups to work on. Hunting boats are distributed about 200m apart and alternately looking for whales 24 hours a day.
Hunting whales in cold Arctic seas has many difficulties and dangers such as erratic winds and winds that overturn boats, icebergs threatening to damage boats, falling feet and falling onto thin ice can lead to death. … Therefore, it requires hunters to be highly impatient. The Eskimo had 1,000 years of whale hunting history and until now their hunting methods have not changed much. They used sharp hooks to throw at whales, causing them to bleed to exhaustion and forced themselves to the surface before pulling to shore. Because of this traditional way of hunting for whales, Ekismo people are hunting heavily.
Because of the cold, scarcity of food, every Eskimo family also hoarded food and foodstuffs mainly seal meat, bears, deer, cod … to use for months and when sick. Seals are the most important food of the Eskimo and they often hunt them with fishing rods and harpoon. In the winter, they found holes in the ice surface of the seal’s underwater breathing holes and inserted them into the ivory fishing rod, when the seal found it strange or breathless to shake the fishing rod, they immediately took plunging through the ice hole killed it. In spring, it is easier to hunt seals because they are on the shore of heating. In the summer, they used a chase boat to hunt seals. Eskimo people often saw whale meat at the shore to ease drying and transport to the village.