TENTH CHAPTER
LEARNING TO WORK
My mothers began to teach me household tasks when I was about twelve years old. “You are getting to be a big girl,” they said. “Soon you will be a woman, and marry. Unless you learn to work, how will you feed your family?”
One of the things given me to do was fetching water from the river. No spring was near our village; and, anyhow, our prairie springs are often bitter with alkali. But the Missouri river, fed by melting snows of the Montana mountains, gave us plenty of fresh water. Missouri river water is muddy; but it soon settles, and is cool and sweet to drink. We Indians love our big river, and we are glad to drink of its waters, as drank our fathers.
A steep path led down the bank to the watering place. Down this path, the village girls made their way every morning to get water for drinking and cooking. They went in little groups or in pairs. Two girls, cousins or chums, sometimes swung a freshly filled pail from a pole on their shoulders.
But there were few pails of metal in my tribe, when I was a little girl. I used to fetch water in a clay pot, sometimes in a buffalo-paunch lining skewered on a stick; but my commonest bucket was of a buffalo heart skin. When my father killed a buffalo, he took out the heart skin, and filled it with grass until it dried. This he gave to Red Blossom, who sewed a little stick on each side of the mouth; and bound a short stick and sinews between them for handle. Such a bucket held about three pints. It was a frail looking vessel, but lasted a long time.
We girls liked to go to the watering place; for, while we were filling our buckets, we could gossip with our friends. For older girls and young men it was a place for courtship. A youth, with painted face and trailing hair switch, would loiter near the path, and smile slyly at his sweetheart as she passed. She did not always smile back. Sometimes for long weeks, she held her eyes away, not even glancing at his moccasins. It was a shy smile that she gave him, at last. Nor did she talk with her love-boy—as we called him—when others were about. We should have thought that silly. But he might wait for her at sunset, by her father’s lodge, and talk with her in the twilight.
But I had other tasks besides fetching water. I learned to cook, sweep, and sew with awl and sinew. Red Blossom taught me to embroider with quills of gull and porcupine, dyed in colors. Sometimes I helped at harder work; gathered drift wood at the river, dressed or scraped hides, and even helped in our cornfield.
I liked to go with my mothers to the cornfields in planting time, when the spring sun was shining and the birds singing in the tree tops. How good it seemed to be out under the open sky, after the long months in our winter camp! A cottonwood tree stood at a turn of the road to our field. Every season a pair of magpies built their nest in it. They were saucy birds and scolded us roundly when we passed. How I used to laugh at their wicked scoldings!