With the Indians in the Rockies

by James Willard Schultz

When we came close to her, she plunged back past the calf and stood awaiting us, determined to protect it to the last. All the hair on her shoulders and back was ruffed and bristling forward, while her eyes blazed with anger, although there was also in them the look of terror and despair. When we got close to her, she rushed at us. We had to do some lively scrambling to keep out of her way. But she soon tired, and then while I attracted her attention, Pitamakan slipped round on the other side of her. As his bow-cord twanged, she dropped her head, and the light almost instantly went out of her eyes. The poor calf met the same fate a moment later. It was cruel work, but as necessary as it was cruel; we killed that we might live.

There remained the two yearlings, and I proposed that we spare them. Pitamakan looked at me with surprise.

"What! Let them go?" he exclaimed. "And many winter moons yet before us? Why, brother, you talk foolishly! Of course we must kill them. Even then we may not have enough meat to last until spring."

So we chased them also out into deep snow, and did as he said. By the time we had one calf skinned we were obliged to go home and gather the night's wood.

The next day we skinned the rest of the animals, cut up the meat, and hung it in trees, whence it could be packed home from time to time. Two of the hides we put to soak in the river, preparatory to graining and tanning them. The others we stretched on frames and allowed to freeze dry, after which we laid them on our couch.

During the short days we tended the deadfalls, skinned and stretched what fur was trapped in them, packed in meat and hung it beside the lodge, and tanned the two hides. Having done the tanning successfully, we went into the tailoring business. Pitamakan cut pieces of proper shape from the big, soft skins, but in the work of sewing I did my share. After three or four evenings' work, we were the proud wearers of new shirts, new leggings, and new mittens.

Our earthen pot fell to pieces the day after we had made glue in it. That was a serious loss, for we had intended to boil meat in it. Roasted meat is good, but does not do so well as a steady diet. The Indians of the North regard boiled meat as we regard bread, that is, as the staff of life. Pitamakan, who craved it more than I, determined, now that we had plenty of hides, to use a part of one for a kettle. From one of the yearling moose hides he cut a large, round piece, soaked it in the river until it was soft, and then sewed the edge in pleats to a birch hoop about two feet in diameter, so as to make a stiff-rimmed bag about as deep as it was wide. With a strip of hide he suspended it from a pole in the lodge roof.

Next he set several clean stones in the fire to heat, and put some rather finely cut meat in the bag with two quarts of water. When the rocks were red-hot, he dropped them one by one into the bag, and pulled them out to reheat as fast as they cooled. In this way the meat was boiled. Such was the ancient way of cooking it before the white traders brought pots and kettle into the North country.

The meat was not cooked long, only long enough, in fact to change its color, and was really more nutritious than it would have been had it been stewed a long time. We enjoyed that first meal of it with keen relish, and thereafter ate more boiled than roasted meat.

As the winter snows settled and hardened, we saw more and more trails of otter along the river, where they traveled from one open hole to another to do their fishing, and one day we began our campaign against them by going fishing ourselves. Our tackle consisted of a sinew cord and loop several feet long, tied to a long, slender pole.