Boiled whale and seal meat were highly prized and there was no more joyous event to break the monotony of tribal life than the towing to shore of a harpooned whale, or the drifting to shore of a whale carcass. In either case the flensing knives were quickly got ready, the carcass cut up, and feasts held in the village. Tom remembers how excitedly—he was then but a boy of ten or so—he once reported the appearance of a drifting whale carcass a quarter-mile from shore, how the whole village rushed into its canoes, and how they laboriously floated it on to the sandy beach, with their stout lanyards of cedar rope wound with nettle-fiber. The whale was cut up carefully, under the direction of a “measurer” into its traditionally determined portions, which were then distributed, according to hereditary right, to those entitled to receive them. Tom himself got the meat about the navel as a reward for his find. There was an unusual amount of whale oil tried out that time, and the fires at the feasts leaped higher than ever as the oil was thrown upon them, lighting up in lurid flashes the house posts carved into the likenesses of legendary ancestors.