How the Women Made a Shelter
When people slept in trees, they did not need to make a shelter.
They were sheltered by the trees.
Long after they began to sleep on the ground, the trees still sheltered them.
The leaves of the trees kept off the rain.
The thick underbrush kept off the cold winds.
When the fire clan moved to a new place, it was always Sharptooth who chose the spot for the fire.
She knew the best sheltered places.
Sometimes she chose a spot near an oak or a birch.
Their tops were well thatched with leaves.
They shed rain almost as well as a roof.
But when the oak and the birch trees dropped their leaves, Sharptooth carried her fire to a fir or a spruce.
These evergreen trees had needle-like leaves.
They gave some protection from the rain and the snow.
But sometimes a drizzling rain kept up for many days.
Sometimes the cold winds blew.
Then the fire clan shivered with the wet and the cold.
Mothers were anxious about their children.
They wanted to keep them safe from harm.
So they tried to keep off the cold wind and the rain.
They had not yet learned many ways of working, but they long had known how to weave cradles of vines.
So the women now tried to weave a shelter.
They broke off large armfuls of evergreens.
They carried them to some saplings that grew near the fire.
Then they bent down the tops of the small growing saplings.
They tied them together and began to weave.
They wove branches of evergreens among them.
They piled larger branches against the wall.
At last the shelter was done.
It was the first shelter that they had made.
There was not one like it on the wooded hills.
“So the women now tried to weave a shelter”