Indian Scout Talks: A Guide for Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls

by Charles A. Eastman

Fig. 10.

Ground arrows are of two kinds. One kind, called “mechá,” is made of the short ribs of buffalo or beef cattle. The rib is cut off four inches from the free end, and two small holes bored, into which sticks, the size of a lead-pencil and about a foot in length, are tightly inserted. The end of each is feathered like an arrow, and they spread out so that the feathered shafts are perhaps nine inches apart. The whole looks much like the white boy’s shuttlecock.

This “mechá” is grasped firmly between the projecting shafts, and thrown against a little mound the size of a pillow, made of snow dampened and packed solidly. From this it rebounds, sails off like a bird, strikes the hard crust to bound up again and again, and finally crawls along like a wounded animal. The goal, which is called the “blanket goal,” is an oblong about six by ten paces in size, drawn on the snow at some fifty yards’ distance. Lengthwise of this oblong are drawn six lines, with seven spaces between. The outer spaces count two, the next four, the next eight, and the center space counts sixteen, if your “mechá” hits it in one throw. Any number may play the game.

The other kind of ground arrow, called “matká,” is shaped like an arrow. It is made of hard wood in one piece, and is about two feet long with a cone-shaped head, burnt and polished to look like horn. The shaft must be limber, and carries a small tuft of feathers to guide it in its flight. Another arrow shows an attached head of elk or buffalo horn, which is better than wood.

The boys throw this in the same manner as the “mechá,” but the course is laid out more elaborately, with obstacles, such as ravines and small hillocks, and a series of five rings each ten feet in diameter, composed of five concentric circles with a “bull’s-eye” in the center. Beside each ring there is a snow mound from which to propel the arrow.

The game is in some ways like golf, and may be played individually or by sides, each player having two strokes in which to reach the next ring, the first a distance throw and the second a push or shove in the direction of the ring. The outer circle counts one, and each inner circle doubles the count, the bull’s-eye counting thirty-two. All the players play in turn, starting from the snow mound nearest the ring where their arrows lie at the beginning of each round. The score is added at the close of the game, the boy or team with the highest number of points being the winner.

This is perhaps the most popular and exciting winter sport for Indian boys ten years of age and upward. Sometimes they send the arrow flying a hundred yards before touching the ground, and half as far again at the first rebound, after which it continues for several shorter flights. The rings are two hundred to three hundred yards apart for young men, or half that distance for small boys; the game may be played on snow-covered lakes or rivers as well as in the open country.

XIV—A WINTER MASQUE

Among the really absorbing amusements of Indian boys, none surpass the games played with tops, which with us are in season in the winter only. The mere spinning of a top would soon become tiresome; it is the various and ingenious stunts that keep the interest alive.

Then, too, each boy makes his own top of every available kind of wood, as well as of horn and bone, and studies its peculiar defects or advantages for the work in hand, so thoroughly that it comes to have for him a kind of personality. He whittles it to a nicety in the regular top shape or any variation of it that he chooses, so long as he can coax and whip it into spinning and humming and singing. He has a stick about a foot long and as big as your thumb; sometimes one end is grooved so that he can pick up the top while spinning. To this stick he ties two or three deer-skin thongs of equal length, making a top whip with which he performs some interesting stunts and plays many amusing games.