The people left the huts and marched down the hill. Then they crossed the river, wading into the water at a shallow place. But the little children had to be carried over; and Tig was carried over by his mother every time until after he was seven.
The tribe used to take a whole day in travelling to the camping-place; and when they got there at last, they used to make a new fire, and light bonfires in the open, and cook their supper, and sleep in tents and booths about the fires.
Up on the hill-side, at the edge of the forest, where the ground had been partly cleared, was the place of the first summer camp. The summer huts were built above ground, of branches of trees, wattled with withies and twigs, and daubed with clay. Sometimes a man had only to repair the hut that he had lived in the summer before. But even if he had to build a new one, it was not such hard work as to build a winter hut. Before a man began to build his summer hut, he picked out a tree with a straight trunk to act as the main support of his hut. He used the tree as a centre pillar to hold up his roof-beams. If he built his summer hut in the open, away from the trees, he set up a pole for a roof-tree. We still talk of living under our own roof-tree, just as those people did long ago.
The fireplaces were made out-of-doors. If they had been indoors, the huts would often have been burned down. Probably they often were burned down even then. So whatever cooking Tig’s mother wanted to do in the summer camps she did at a big fire outside the huts.
The winter village of dug-out huts was high up on the hillside at the upper end of a sheltered valley, and the summer camps were set up at different places upon the hills, as the people moved about with their cattle; and wherever they were, they always put up a stockade of posts around the huts, to keep themselves and their cattle safe from wolves and bears.
But besides their dwelling-places, the people had a fort, which was meant to be used only in time of war for the tribe to retire to, if their enemies should attack them. It was built at the top of a high hill, in the form of a ring, with a mound of earth and stones, and a stockade all round, and a deep ditch outside. The fort was big enough to take in all the people and their cattle in case of necessity; but when Tig was a baby, it had not been used for a long time and nobody lived in it.
Chapter the Third
Tig’s Mother, and the Lessons that she taught him