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.”