I could start the stones spinning easily enough, but before they fairly began to hum one or two, if not the whole three, would whiz off, each in its own direction, beyond the reach of my whip.
The sport seems to require a peculiar drawing stroke of the whip that I could never acquire.
The Snow-dart.—Another sport, in which I approached a little nearer to the skill of these same Indian boys, was that of throwing the snow-dart. The dart was a perfectly straight piece of hickory about five feet long, made three-cornered, and rounded up at one end. It was about an inch wide and half as thick, and was thrown with the flat side up. It had to be made with the greatest care and polished as smooth as glass. It was always a marvel to me how the Indians, with no other tools than a hatchet and knife, could make these little hickory flyers so perfectly. It was wonderful, too, to see how far these Winnebago youths could send one of them. Selecting a level stretch of snow, as upon a frozen river or lake, and where the surface was somewhat hardened by thawing and freezing, the players would stand at a great distance apart. One of them would take the dart by its middle, lightly balance it between his thumb and the two first fingers, and with a strong underhand throw launch the shaft toward his opponent.
If the snow was just soft enough to allow the sharp under edge of the dart to sink slightly into its surface, and thus hold it straight upon its course, then the sport was at its best.
The Grass Game of the Digger Indians of California.—I first saw it played in the Russian River Valley, a great hop-growing region, where, at the close of the picking season, these Indians, to the number of two or three hundred, gather to feast upon watermelons and other good things, and to indulge in pony-races, foot-races, wrestling-matches, shinny, and other games for several days in succession. I had hard work to make my way through the crowd that pressed around a large circular enclosure made of tall willow bushes stuck in the ground where the game was going on. The players, four in number, were men grown, and squatted on their knees, two on one side of the enclosure, facing the other two on the opposite side. On a third side, and equally distant from both sets of players, sat the umpire. Each player had a little pile of dry grass in front of him; but only the two on one side made use of the grass at the same time, for the game is but an elaborate form of "hide the pencil" that every school-boy is quite familiar with, and while the players on one side did the hiding those on the other did the guessing.
To begin the game the player takes a little round stick about three-quarters of an inch in diameter, sharpened at each end, and about two inches and a half long. This he holds up in plain view of his opponent on the opposite side of the enclosure, whose keen eyes follow every movement as the player takes up handful after handful of the grass in front of him and winds it about the stick until he has formed a ball perhaps as large as his head. During this performance the player works himself into a frenzy of excitement, and makes all manner of frantic endeavors to "rattle" his adversary. Twisting and squirming about, he bends his body in all sorts of contortions. Time and again he pretends to pluck the little stick out of the ball he is forming, and hide it under a knee or a foot. He tosses the ball high in the air, then from hand to hand, then into the air again, and catches it behind his back. Now his chant is low and soft, his movements slow and measured; then higher and higher he pitches his voice, and faster and faster become his motions, until one can scarcely see his hands as they dart about in a cloud of flying grass.
Presently, at a signal from the umpire, he drops the ball of grass in front of him, and holds his closed hands behind his back.
Slowly his adversary extends his left arm as if grasping a bow, and raising his bent right arm to the level of his eye, as if drawing an arrow upon an imaginary enemy, with the forefinger of his left hand he points to the exact spot in which he expects to find the little stick. Every breath is hushed, and a deathlike silence prevails as he points steadily for a moment, then lets his right hand fly back against his chest with a hollow thud, as if he had let fly an arrow.
With a wild yell, in which every spectator joins, the player then produces the little stick—from the ball of grass, from under a knee or a foot, or from one of his closed palms, as the case may be. If he has been cunning enough to deceive the sharp eye of his opponent, the stakes are his; but if the guesser correctly locates the stick, the umpire throws to him the string of wampum, or whatever the stake may be. The sticks are then thrown across to the opposite players, and the game goes on.