Jack the Young Cowboy: An Eastern Boy's Experiance on a Western Round-up

by George Bird Grinnell

The grove was only fifty yards away, and Joe soon felled a young tree, which was six or eight inches through at the butt. Cutting fifteen feet off the larger end, he and Jack carried it over and soon wedged it in the fork of the box elder, only a short distance from the hole where the hide was soaking.

"Now," Joe explained, "I've got to peel this stick, because any little lumps on the bark are likely to make us cut the hide."

They set to work and in a few minutes the lower five or six feet of the pole was free from its bark and shone white in the sun. They looked over the wood, and shaved down one or two little lumps until the surface of the peeled wood was quite smooth.

"There," exclaimed Joe; "that's all we can do to-night. My scraper is in my bed. I tied that up to the bows of the wagon until it got dry; and to-morrow, after our work is done, it won't take long to scrape the hair from the hide and to put on the brains. I'd like to have a day more to work on the thing, but we've got to do the best we can in the time we have."

The next day, after the work was over and the horses turned out, Joe repaired to the hole where the hide was soaking, and Jack went with him. Again they had recourse to the cook, who, after some grumbling, gave them half a dozen nails.

When the tail gate of the wagon was removed, the boys discovered that much of the water in the hole had soaked away into the soil, and the top of the stone on the deer hide was above the water. The hide, however, was still covered. After the stone had been removed and the hide taken out, they found it perfectly soft and pliable.

Joe carried it down to the stream and thoroughly rinsed it there, thus removing all the earth which clung to it. When he took it from the water he squeezed from it all the moisture that he could, then carried it up and hung it over the leaning pole, hair side out, and head toward the upper end. Now, with a stone, he drove a couple of nails into the pole and to them he fastened the head of the hide. Then he produced his scraper. Jack at once recognized it as a part of the deer's foreleg—the double bone that runs down from the elbow to meet the deer's wrist—what is usually called the knee. Of course Jack knew that in the hoofed animals the bone of the upper arm, which is called the humerus, is altogether hidden within the body and that the joint of the foreleg close to the body corresponds with man's elbow. Joe's scraper was the bone running from this elbow down to the deer's knee, and Jack was interested and somewhat astonished—for he had never before thought about the matter—to see what a splendid natural scraper this bone made. He said as much to Joe.

"Didn't you ever notice," asked Joe, "how often an Indian uses some natural and common thing for a tool in his work? I've seen that often, and it always made me wonder. Now you see this tool, in its curved shape and with that thin edge there of one of the bones, makes a great scraper. It's almost like a drawing-knife; and then look at the two handles on the ends—ain't that fine? The Indian that showed me how to tan, scraped the edge of his bone and made it a little sharper than this one is; but I reckon this will do all right; anyhow, we'll try. Of course, if we hadn't saved this bone from the deer's leg, we could have used a beef rib, or even the back of a knife; but this is the best and handiest thing I know of."

"That seems to me about a perfect tool for this work," declared Jack; "and I wonder at it too."

Joe took the leg bone of the deer and standing before the skin which hung over the pole, flesh side to the wood, began with long even strokes to scrape the hair from it. To Jack's surprise this came away readily and evenly, leaving the naked hide smooth and white. From time to time Joe shifted the skin, and gradually removed the hair from the whole hide down to the very edges, though on the head and ears the work was more raggedly done than on the neck, back and sides. Before very long, though, the skin was absolutely hairless, and as white on the hair side as it was white on the flesh side when Joe turned it over. It was quite free from superfluous tissue, for the boys had cleaned it well before stretching it.