While the children slept that night, Antler talked with the women. And when morning came, the women took skins and made the children warm clothes and moccasins.
When the children put on their wolf-skin suits, they looked like a pack of wolves. Sometimes they played they were wolves. Then they chased make-believe wild horses.
Sometimes when the children were playing in the snow, they found the antlers of a full-grown stag. The children began to look for the antlers of the full-grown stags in early winter. But they knew that the other reindeer kept their antlers until early spring.
An old stag’s antlers were large and strong, and the children liked to find them. They would pick them up and hold them in their hands and would then make believe they were Cave-men trapping reindeer in the snow.
One day Greybeard showed Fleetfoot and Flaker how to trap the reindeer in the snow. He showed them how to dig a pitfall in the drifts. The boys found a large drift near the trail and they cut out a large block of snow. They hollowed a deep pit under the crust which they took pains not to break. Then they fitted the block of snow in its place, thus covering the pit.
To make sure that the reindeer would come to the pitfall they scattered moss over the thin crust. Then Greybeard taught them to say,
“Come down to the river, reindeer;
Come down to the river to drink.
Come eat the moss I have spread for you,
Come and fall into my trap.”
All the Cave-men believed that these words would charm the reindeer to the spot. They always muttered such lines as charms when they went out to hunt. And so Greybeard taught the boys the lines, for he wanted them to know all the Cave-men’s charms.
THINGS TO DO