A chum goes up in an hour: twenty-five to forty spruce poles on a tripod, then the nyuk — sewn reindeer hides, sixty to eighty skins for winter — dropped over them and banked with snow. Board floor, skins on top, stove at the centre, smoke hole at the apex. It holds at minus fifty.

The ornament follows the sewing. White kamus against dark kamus in stepped, rectilinear blocks, cut and stitched, never shaded. Narrow cloth ribbons of red, blue and green run along the seams. Red is the one saturated colour in an otherwise achromatic material culture, and it is used the way the herders use it — in strips, squares and triangles, sparingly.