Jack the Young Explorer: A Boy's Experiances in the Unknown Northwest

by George Bird Grinnell

“Yes, I think I’ve heard about that. They used to wear a kind of buffalo skin dress, didn’t they, Joe?”

“Yes,” said Joe, “sometimes they wore a kind of a cap and coat made of buffalo skins, and sometimes they just carried their robes. Of course, they didn’t show themselves close to and in plain sight of the buffalo. They just showed themselves enough to make the buffalo wonder what they were, and follow ’em to try to find out. The Indians think that it was the power of the buffalo rock that used to make the buffalo come, but I guess it was just nothing but curiosity. Everybody has seen antelope get scared and run away, and then if a man dodges out of sight very likely they’ll turn around and run back and close up to him, to try to find out what it was they got scared at.”

“Sure, that’s so,” said Hugh, “and it isn’t antelope or buffalo alone. You’ll see elk and black-tailed deer do the same thing. They’ll stand and look and look, and often you can fire three or four shots at them before they’ll start to run away. In the same way if a bear sees something that he don’t understand, why, he gets up on his hind legs and looks as hard as he can. Of course, all these animals would rather smell than look; their noses tell them the truth and they don’t have to smell a second time to find out whether it’s an enemy or not, but often they have to look half a dozen times. Animals are mighty inquisitive creatures. If they see something they don’t understand they want to find out about it.”

“Why, Hugh,” said Jack, “it isn’t animals alone. Birds do the same thing. I’ve never seen this myself, but the books tell about it and I talked with one man, a friend of my uncle’s, who had seen it himself. In the winter when the ducks are down South and in big flocks they used to have a way of shooting them that they called toling. The way they did it was this: If a lot of ducks were sitting on the water too far off from the shore to be shot at, the gunners would go down and hide close to the shore and then they would send out a little dog that was trained to run up and down and play about so as to attract the attention of the ducks. The ducks might be sitting far off in a big raft or flock, many of them perhaps asleep; but when they saw the little dog playing, some of them would lift their heads and swim in toward the shore to find out what he was doing. Gradually more and more ducks would lift their heads and swim in, until, finally, the whole flock would be coming. As they got nearer, the dog, which of course was watching them, would make himself smaller and smaller, until finally he just crawled along the shore on his belly and perhaps gradually worked away from the beach and into the grass, but those fool ducks would keep swimming in, trying to see him, until at last they would get within gunshot, and the people hidden there would give them one barrel on the water, and then one as they rose, and sometimes kill twenty-five or thirty of them.”

“Well,” said Hugh, “that’s one on me. I never heard of that before, but since we’re branching off onto ducks, I’ll tell you what I have heard of and know of its being done, too, though I never did see it done. In spring and fall, in ponds where the wild rice grows, over, say, in Minnesota, there used to be terrible lots of ducks and geese stopping in spring and fall to feed, on their way north and south. The Indians, the Sioux anyhow, and likely Chippewas or Saulteaux, when they found a place where these ducks were right plenty, used to strip off and make a kind of a little hat or cap of grass that they’d put on their heads, and then they’d wade in the water and move along very slowly so that this cap would look either like a little floating trash or a little group of grass stems projecting above the water, and then they’d work up close to the ducks and catch them by the feet and pull them under and then wring their necks.”

“Yes,” said Jack, “I guess that’s all right, for I’ve heard of East Indian people doing the same thing, only they fitted a kind of a gourd over their heads and walked around with that, so that it just looked like a gourd floating in the water. Don’t the Blackfeet do anything like this, Joe?”

“I guess not,” said Joe; “I never heard anything like it. They say in old times, long before the white people came, the Piegans used to go to the shallow prairie lakes where ducks and geese bred, at the time of the year when they can’t fly, and then the dogs and young men would go into the pond on one side and drive out all the birds on the other and there the women and children would kill them with sticks. In the early spring, too, when the birds had their nests, they used to go to these lakes and get plenty of eggs. I bet you never heard the way they used to cook them.”

“I don’t know,” said Jack, “I reckon I never did.”

“Why,” said Joe, “they used to dig a hole in the ground, a pretty deep hole, and then put some water in it, and right over the water they’d build a little platform of twigs and put on that platform as many eggs as it would hold, and above that they’d build another platform and put eggs on that and so on to the top, maybe have three or four of these little platforms built of willows to hold the eggs up. Then from the top of the ground they dug out a little slanting hole to the bottom of the first hole. Then they covered the big hole with twigs and put grass on that and dirt on the grass. Then they built a fire close to the hole and heated rocks and rolled them down the little side hole, so that they would go into the water at the bottom of the big hole. They would keep rolling these hot rocks in until the water got very hot and made plenty of steam. The steam couldn’t get out of the big hole and it just stayed there hot and cooked the eggs. Then when they thought the eggs were cooked they uncovered the big hole and took them from the platforms and there they were all cooked.”

“That was ingenious, wasn’t it, Hugh?” said Jack.