Chapter 7 OLD-TIME HUNTING WAYS

"WELL," said Hugh, when they rode up to the tent, "I'm glad you got some meat. Now, before you even unsaddle, I'm going to send one of you boys up into that cottonwood tree there. Knot a couple of those sling ropes together and let us haul that meat up above the flies if we can. It'll spoil in a day if we leave it down here close to the ground, where the blow flies can get at it."

The wisdom of this advice was recognized at once, and Jack promptly scrambled up into the cottonwood and made his way into the lower branches. Joe threw him the end of a sling rope and Jack climbed well into the tree, and then, passing the rope over a branch, the meat was hauled up and tied thirty or forty feet above the ground, out of reach of the flies and exposed to the breeze which blew almost constantly up or down the lake.

As they sat around the fire that night after supper Jack said, "Hugh, a man who was hunting sheep all the time would get to have mighty good wind, wouldn't he?"

"Yes," said Hugh, "that's surely so. Good wind, strong legs and a mighty steady head come to anyone who hunts sheep or goats much. You've got to be climbing up or down pretty much all the time. You must look for your game on the high peaks and ridges and along the cliffs. Of course, where sheep are plenty you can follow the sheep trails, but sometimes it's just pretty straight up and down climbing over the rocks and in places where, if a man lost his footing, he would roll a long way. I never minded climbing over the rocks, no matter how steep they were, but sometimes it's wearying work to crawl around over the shale, that yields and slips under your feet, and where for every foot you go up you slip back nine inches; and of course, when the mountains are covered with snow and ice it's harder yet, because you never can be quite sure of your foothold."

"Well," said Jack, "there are some Indians that hunt sheep almost altogether, aren't there?"

"Yes," replied Hugh, "the Sheep Eaters get their name from the fact that they used to make their main living by hunting sheep."

"I've heard of the Sheep Eaters," said Jack, "but I've forgotten who they are and where they lived. Tell me what you know about them, won't you?"

"Well," said Hugh, "they live south of here and their main range used to be somewhere near that country that we went through two or three years ago, where those hot springs and spouting geysers are. Sheep Eaters, as I understand it, are a band of the Bannocks, and the Bannocks are relations to the Snakes.

"In old times they say that these Sheep Eaters used to make drives of sheep. They would build a lot of blinds, and hide along the trails where the sheep were accustomed to go up and down the mountains, and then they'd send men around and scare the sheep, and when they came down near the blinds the Indians hidden there would shoot them. Then, of course, they used to still-hunt them with bows and arrows. I've heard that the men who were hunting sheep used to carry a head and skin and cover themselves with it in part, and disguised in that way, used to get up within arrow shot of the game. The man's legs were rubbed with white or gray clay, and if he went along in a stooping posture, with his body covered with the animal's skin and the head, it's easy to see how he might get up pretty close to the game. I read a book once written by John Franklin, that man, you know, that was lost up in the Arctic a good many years ago and about whom there was a great deal of excitement at the time, in which he told how the Huskies up north used to hunt caribou something the same way, only in this case there were two men, one walking behind the other, both stooping down and the man in the lead carrying a caribou's head. The book said that the rear man carried the two guns, and that the man in front, who carried the head, imitated the deer so well that sometimes they could walk right up to the edge of the herd. Seems to me I've heard something of the same sort about Indians using the antelope head in hunting antelope."

"Well," said Jack, "that's seems queer. I don't believe you could do that with any game in these days." "No," said Hugh, "maybe not, but you must remember in those old times game was plenty; it never was scared by noises, because then they didn't have any guns, and the people in any range of mountain country were not many and were not often seen by the game. Speaking of this way of using game heads makes me think of a story that Wolf Voice told me about something that his grandfather saw a great many years ago. You don't know Wolf Voice, of course, but he's a young fellow-not so very young either, come to think about it; he must be a middle-aged man by this time. He's half Cheyenne and half Minitari, and he did some considerable scouting for General Miles a few years ago. This is what he told me that his grandfather saw: He was one of a war party of Cheyennes that had gone off to try and take horses from the Snakes. One morning they were traveling along through the mountains, fifteen or sixteen of them, walking through a deep canyon. Presently one of them saw on a ledge of the canyon far above them, the head and shoulders of a big mountain sheep, which seemed to be looking out over the valley. The man pointed it out to the other members of the war party, and they watched it as they went along. After a while it drew back from the ledge, and a little later they saw it again, further along the canyon, and it stood there right at the edge of the precipice and seemed to be looking up and down the valley. The Cheyennes kept watching it as they went along, and presently they saw a mountain lion jump on the sheep's back from another ledge above it and both animals fell over the cliff, a long way before they struck the rocks below. The Cheyennes, feeling sure that the sheep had been killed either by the fall or by the lion, ran to the place to get the meat. When they got there, the lion was trying to get away on three legs and one of the Indians shot it with an arrow. Then they went to the sheep, and when they started to skin it they saw that it wasn't a sheep, but a man wearing the skin and head of a sheep. He had been hunting, and his bow and arrows were wrapped in the skin and lay against his breast. The fall had killed him. They could tell from the way his hair was dressed and from his moccasins that he was a Bannock."

"Well," said Jack, "that's an interesting story, and that brings the fashion these people had right home to us, doesn't it?"

"Yes," said Hugh, "I guess there's no doubt but that they made these disguises and used them. Why, Joe here will tell you what he's heard from his grandfathers about the way the men used to dress up and lead the buffalo into the piskuns."

"Yes, I think I've heard about that. They used to wear a kind of buffalo skin dress, didn't they, Joe?"

"Yes," said Joe, "sometimes they wore a kind of a cap and coat made of buffalo skins, and sometimes they just carried their robes. Of course, they didn't show themselves close to and in plain sight of the buffalo. They just showed themselves enough to make the buffalo wonder what they were, and follow 'em to try to find out. The Indians think that it was the power of the buffalo rock that used to make the buffalo come, but I guess it was just nothing but curiosity. Everybody has seen antelope get scared and run away, and then if a man dodges out of sight very likely they'll turn around and run back and close up to him, to try to find out what it was they got scared at."

"Sure, that's so," said Hugh, "and it isn't antelope or buffalo alone. You'll see elk and black-tailed deer do the same thing. They'll stand and look and look, and often you can fire three or four shots at them before they'll start to run away. In the same way if a bear sees something that he don't understand, why, he gets up on his hind legs and looks as hard as he can. Of course, all these animals would rather smell than look; their noses tell them the truth and they don't have to smell a second time to find out whether it's an enemy or not, but often they have to look half a dozen times. Animals are mighty inquisitive creatures. If they see something they don't understand they want to find out about it."

"Why, Hugh," said Jack, "it isn't animals alone. Birds do the same thing. I've never seen this myself, but the books tell about it and I talked with one man, a friend of my uncle's, who had seen it himself. In the winter when the ducks are down South and in big flocks they used to have a way of shooting them that they called toling. The way they did it was this: If a lot of ducks were sitting on the water too far off from the shore to be shot at, the gunners would go down and hide close to the shore and then they would send out a little dog that was trained to run up and down and play about so as to attract the attention of the ducks. The ducks might be sitting far off in a big raft or flock, many of them perhaps asleep; but when they saw the little dog playing, some of them would lift their heads and swim in toward the shore to find out what he was doing. Gradually more and more ducks would lift their heads and swim in, until, finally, the whole flock would be coming. As they got nearer, the dog, which of course was watching them, would make himself smaller and smaller, until finally he just crawled along the shore on his belly and perhaps gradually worked away from the beach and into the grass, but those fool ducks would keep swimming in, trying to see him, until at last they would get within gunshot, and the people hidden there would give them one barrel on the water, and then one as they rose, and sometimes kill twenty-five or thirty of them."

"Well," said Hugh, "that's one on me. I never heard of that before, but since we're branching off onto ducks, I'll tell you what I have heard of and know of its being done, too, though I never did see it done. In spring and fall, in ponds where the wild rice grows, over, say, in Minnesota, there used to be terrible lots of ducks and geese stopping in spring and fall to feed, on their way north and south. The Indians, the Sioux anyhow, and likely Chippewas or Saulteaux, when they found a place where these ducks were right plenty, used to strip off and make a kind of a little hat or cap of grass that they'd put on their heads, and then they'd wade in the water and move along very slowly so that this cap would look either like a little floating trash or a little group of grass stems projecting above the water, and then they'd work up close to the ducks and catch them by the feet and pull them under and then wring their necks."

"Yes," said Jack, "I guess that's all right, for I've heard of East Indian people doing the same thing, only they fitted a kind of a gourd over their heads and walked around with that, so that it just looked like a gourd floating in the water. Don't the Blackfeet do anything like this, Joe?"

"I guess not," said Joe; "I never heard anything like it. They say in old times, long before the white people came, the Piegans used to go to the shallow prairie lakes where ducks and geese bred, at the time of the year when they can't fly, and then the dogs and young men would go into the pond on one side and drive out all the birds on the other and there the women and children would kill them with sticks. In the early spring, too, when the birds had their nests, they used to go to these lakes and get plenty of eggs. I bet you never heard the way they used to cook them."

"I don't know," said Jack, "I reckon I never did."

"Why," said Joe, "they used to dig a hole in the ground, a pretty deep hole, and then put some water in it, and right over the water they'd build a little platform of twigs and put on that platform as many eggs as it would hold, and above that they'd build another platform and put eggs on that and so on to the top, maybe have three or four of these little platforms built of willows to hold the eggs up. Then from the top of the ground they dug out a little slanting hole to the bottom of the first hole. Then they covered the big hole with twigs and put grass on that and dirt on the grass. Then they built a fire close to the hole and heated rocks and rolled them down the little side hole, so that they would go into the water at the bottom of the big hole. They would keep rolling these hot rocks in until the water got very hot and made plenty of steam. The steam couldn't get out of the big hole and it just stayed there hot and cooked the eggs. Then when they thought the eggs were cooked they uncovered the big hole and took them from the platforms and there they were all cooked."

"That was ingenious, wasn't it, Hugh?" said Jack.

"Yes, so it was," said Hugh, "but then these people were mighty ingenious in many ways. Just think of the way they used to cook in a buffalo hide, or in the paunch of an animal. You and I would eat raw meat all our lives before we could get up such a scheme as that."

"Yes, that's so," replied Jack. "It's about the last thing I should think of. Practically all their boiling had to be done by means of hot stones put into the water, for, of course, they never had any vessels that could be set over a fire until they got pottery. I don't suppose anybody knows when they first invented it, but it may have been a long time ago."

"Well," said Hugh, "don't be too sure about their not having anything to put over a fire to boil. I never saw it myself, but I've been told by people that I believe, that these Saulteaux up North used to boil water in their birch bark dishes. They say that they could hang a birch bark kettle over the fire and boil water in it, and that the birch bark wouldn't take fire while the water was in the kettle."

"Well," said Jack, "I certainly would like to see that done. I suppose it's so, if you've been told so by people that you believe, but it seems to me that's one of the hardest stories that's been told me since I've been out in this country."