ide the door, and a few of the hardier men fishing through
holes in the ice. About the tepee the snow was banked, and within the
air was warm and heavy from the open fire and the long pipes of the
reclining braves, who gambled with their neighbors at the game of "the
shot and the mitten".

Thus through the two stormy months the Indians frittered away the time,
eating their corn and wild rice seasoned with tallow. But when the first
thaws of spring caused the sap in the maple trees to run, and when some
of the more venturesome came back from a winter visit to the trading
house with the word that the trader was waiting for skins in return for
the blankets and ammunition he had given them the preceding fall,
the village divided--part going to the sugar bush, and part going to the
prairie lakes and swamps for muskrats. In May they returned on the
swollen streams with heavily freighted canoes to their villages of bark
houses. During the summer there were many tasks--blue berries to be
gathered in the woods, canoes to be built, tepees to be repaired,
turnips to be dug, and pipestone to be brought from the far distant
quarry. All through the hot months the women toiled in the corn fields;
and when the corn was in the milk, all the village children screamed and
waved their arms to frighten away the blackbirds. When the harvest had
been carefully placed in bark barrels and buried, part of the village
had already left to hunt the fox or gather wild rice along the lakes and
cranberries in the marshes.

And now came October and the deer hunt. There were only the extremely
old people and the invalids to wave good-bye as the procession set out
over the prairie--old men who could scarcely walk, bands of shouting
children, hunters already on the alert, women with their bundles, and
horses and dogs dragging on two poles the provisions and the skins of
the tepees. For more than two months the program was the same: the march
through the drifts and across the icy rivers, the morning council about
a blazing fire before scattering over the prairie, and the triumphal
return of the successful hunter at evening with the carcass of a bear,
deer, or elk, across his shoulders and his name shouted through
the camp by the children gathered to welcome him. By January they were
all back again at their villages.[280]

It was this scheme of life which was to be gradually transformed. There
were, of course, variations when war parties crept against the