Figure 30
Sometimes in one of the cache pits outside of the lodge we put a bag of beans, or sometimes two bags. Each bag was of skin and was about as long as one’s arm; its shape was long and round.
In the fall, when we went to our winter lodges, corn, squash, beans, and whatever else was needed, we loaded on our horses and took with us. As soon as we came to our winter lodge we made ready a cache pit at once and stored these things away.
We opened a cache pit whenever we got out of provisions. When should this be, you ask? When we got out of provisions. This might happen at any time. One winter, I remember, we got out of provisions and a number of our people left the winter village and went to the lodges at Like-a-fishhook village, to open a cache. The Sioux surrounded them there. Our people took refuge in a kind of fort that belonged to the traders and fired down from an upper room; they killed two of the Sioux.
Cache pit F in the diagram, we made afterwards. Pit E was also of later make; we dug it after we got potatoes; it was inside the lodge and near the corral for horses.
Cache pit C we had to abandon because mice got into it and we could not get rid of them. So we filled it up with earth and dug pit D. We stored gummy corn in cache pit D and used it for two years. The third year the Sioux came against our village in the winter time and stole our corn and burned down my father’s lodge.
I have been telling you how the cache pit was used for storing things for winter; but I do not mean that it was of no use in summer time. In early spring we put into a cache pit two big packages of dried meat and a bladder full of bone grease. We did not take them out until about August or a little earlier. The meat would still be good, and the bone grease would be hard and sweet, just as if it were frozen.
A cache pit lasted for a long time, used year after year.