“Yes, so it was,” said Hugh, “but then these people were mighty ingenious in many ways. Just think of the way they used to cook in a buffalo hide, or in the paunch of an animal. You and I would eat raw meat all our lives before we could get up such a scheme as that.”
“Yes, that’s so,” replied Jack. “It’s about the last thing I should think of. Practically all their boiling had to be done by means of hot stones put into the water, for, of course, they never had any vessels that could be set over a fire until they got pottery. I don’t suppose anybody knows when they first invented it, but it may have been a long time ago.”
“Well,” said Hugh, “don’t be too sure about their not having anything to put over a fire to boil. I never saw it myself, but I’ve been told by people that I believe, that these Saulteaux up North used to boil water in their birch bark dishes. They say that they could hang a birch bark kettle over the fire and boil water in it, and that the birch bark wouldn’t take fire while the water was in the kettle.”
“Well,” said Jack, “I certainly would like to see that done. I suppose it’s so, if you’ve been told so by people that you believe, but it seems to me that’s one of the hardest stories that’s been told me since I’ve been out in this country.”
CHAPTER VIII
A BIG BEAR HIDE
THE next morning while the party were cooking and eating breakfast, a swarm of mosquitoes settled upon the camp in great numbers. Not only did they trouble the men, but the horses were greatly annoyed by them; so much as that they stopped feeding and began to wander off, seeking the thickets of quaking aspen and willow, through which they walked in order to brush off the insects. Besides the mosquitoes, the green head flies—bulldogs, Hugh called them—were very troublesome. Before breakfast was over Hugh said, “Look here, boys, we can’t stay here. The flies are too bad. We must pack up and go on and get somewhere higher up, or else to a place where the wind is blowing. Unless we do that we are likely to lose our horses. They’ll run away on us.”
“Yes,” said Jack, “we’ve either got to get high up on the hills or else go out on the prairie. Here the flies are too bad.”
“Well,” said Hugh, “you two boys build two or three small fires and throw some grass or wet bark on them so as to make plenty of smoke, and then go out and round up the horses and bring them in, so that they can stand in the smoke. Then we’ll cache the wagon here in the brush somewhere, and pack up and go on up the river and see if we can’t find some place where the flies are not so thick.”
It took the boys but a short time to build a line of small fires at right angles to the lake, down which a gentle breeze was blowing, and then, pulling some green grass and stripping the wet bark off an old rotting cottonwood log, they soon had a line of smokes too strong for any insect. Then, going a little way down the lake, they found the horses and drove them back to leeward of the fire, where they stopped in apparently great contentment, with only their heads visible above the smoke.
Meanwhile Hugh had been unloading the wagon, getting out the pack saddles with their riggings and making up the packs. A portion of the provisions he left in the wagon, but the flour and the bacon he tied with extra ropes and, when the boys had finished with the horses, he had one of them climb into a tree and hang the food where it could not be reached by mice or ground squirrels. The sheep meat was lowered and found to be perfectly good and so dried on the outside that the flies would not trouble it. It was put in an old flour sack to go on one of the packs.