White-tailed deer, however, lived in the heavy timber that lines the banks of the Missouri river. A few are still found on this reservation. However, though haunting the woods near our gardens, these deer never molested our crops; they never ate our corn ears nor nibbled the stalks.
About Old Tent Covers
I have said that we made the threshing booth under the drying stage of an old tent cover.
Buffalo hides that we wanted to use for making tent covers, were taken in the spring when the buffaloes shed their hair and their skins are thin. The skin tent cover which we then made would be used all that summer; and the next winter, perhaps, we would begin to cut it up for moccasins. The following spring, again, we could take more buffalo hides and make another tent cover.
Not all families renewed a tent so often. Some families used a tent two years, and some even a much longer time; but many families used a tent cover but a single season. It was a very usual thing for the women of a family to make a new tent cover, in the spring.
Old tent covers, as I have said, were cut up for moccasins, or they were put to other uses. There was always a good deal of need about the lodge for skins that had been scraped bare of hair; and the skins in a tent cover were, of course, of this kind. Every bed in the earth lodge, in old times, was covered with an old tent cover.
Skins needed in threshing time were partly of these bed covers, taken down from the beds. Often the piece of an old tent cover from which we had been cutting moccasins would be brought out and used. Then we commonly had other buffalo hides, scraped bare of hair, stored in the lodge, ready for any use.
Buffaloes were plentiful in those days, and skins were easy to get. We had always abundance for use in threshing time.