Part 7

Dobran’s wife, who was sitting beside her husband, was busily spinning yarn; and when Dobran had finished speaking, she began to hum a song as she drew the thread. She had a big bunch of wool fastened to the end of a stick beside her, and she drew out some hair from the wool and twisted it into a thread between her thumb and finger. Then she tied the end of this to the spindle, which was a pointed stick loaded about the middle with a ball of dried clay, and started twirling it round with her other hand. As the spindle went spinning round in the air, and dropping towards the ground, it drew the thread out longer, twisting it all the time. As soon as the spindle reached the ground, Dobran’s wife picked it up, wound the thread round it and set it spinning again; and so she went on until she had spun a good ball of yarn.

Outside the hut a daughter of Dobran’s, whose name was Eira, was sitting at the loom weaving cloth. Her loom was an upright wooden frame, and the main threads, called the warp, were stretched from the top of the loom to the bottom and kept taut by means of stone weights. In her hand Eira held a shuttle containing the cross-thread, called the woof, which she passed in and out through the warp, from side to side of the loom. After she had worked in five or six cross-lines in this way, and so had got a narrow piece of cloth woven, she stopped and picked up a thin, flat piece of wood, cut into teeth like a comb, and combed the web and pressed it down firmly. Her thread was finer and her cloth better than the women made in Tig’s village, and he stood and watched her. “Aye,” said Dobran, “she is a famous weaver. She shall give thee a girdle of her own weaving. Nay, now, she shall weave thee a shirt of three colours, and thou shalt come again and fetch it for thyself.”

On the next morning Tig rose early, and found that Dobran’s people were already astir. Eira and another girl were grinding corn on a big, flat rubbing stone; and afterwards Eira took the meal that they had ground to make cakes for breakfast.

Then, after they had eaten the morning meal, Tig bade farewell to his friends, the Lake People, and set off homeward. Some of the men paddled him ashore in a canoe, and guided him through the woods and set him on the way; and he returned to his father’s camp.

_Chapter the Twenty-fifth_

_DICK AND HIS FRIENDS: A Talk about Ancient Lake-Dwellings_

WHEN Uncle John had finished reading, he asked the boys if they had ever heard before of people living in houses with water all round as a defence against their enemies?

“Yes, if you mean a single house,” Dick said, “you told me that your house here once had a moat all round it.”

“Yes,” said Uncle John, “so it had; and though the village of the Lake People was built many hundreds of years before ever there was a house like mine in all the country, yet the notion was the same. In the old days men felt safer with deep water all round them, than when there was only a stockade, or even a wall. The villages by the lakes in Switzerland that I told you of before, were built in that way over the water on piles.”

David wanted to know how the Lake People had managed to support the platform on which the huts were built--was it held up by straight piles, like a table with a lot of legs?

“No,” said Uncle John, “not in Dobran’s village, anyway. I will tell you what I know about it. Some time ago a farmer who lives near here had a boggy place on his farm. It lay in a hollow among his fields, and in winter or after a great deal of rain it became almost a lake. People used to say that once upon a time there had been a lake there, but it had got filled up with moss and peat. However, the farmer wanted to turn it into ploughing-land, so he set to work to drain it; his men dug drains and ran off all the water, and then they saw a large, low mound standing up out of the mud. And when they came to clear the mound away, they found that it was the remains of an ancient lake village that had lain hidden in the bog under the water for hundreds of years. I heard about it, so I went, and stayed all the time, day after day, while they were digging out the remains; and so I got a good notion of how those old people, that we have been reading about, used to make their lake-villages in this part of the country--for in other places they had other ways.”

“What did you find?” the boys all asked.

“Well, we didn’t find any huts; they had all gone to decay long before; but the great platform of tree-trunks was there, and its foundations and parts of what had been the gangway to the shore. And we found the old rubbish-heap, and we picked over and sifted every bit of it; and I will show you an arrow-head and some beads, and some pieces of pottery, that I picked out of the rubbish myself. In this rubbish were great numbers of bones of animals that the people had used for food. The bones were of deer and cattle and sheep and some of smaller animals, and some of birds. But the greatest find of all was a canoe. We found it lying buried in the mud, wonderfully preserved. We could see that it had been made, like Robinson Crusoe’s boat, out of the trunk of a tree, and hollowed out by fire, and hewn with stone axes.

“And the mound was cleared away from top to bottom, and very hard work this was; for it was solidly built of tree-trunks laid in rows like the sheaves in a corn-stack: there were hundreds of trees, though none of them very large. Then there were piles driven in upright to hold the others together, and great stones that had been sunk to keep the beams down: and at the bottom of all were bundles of brushwood and more large stones, which had been put down first for the foundations. And if you bear in mind that the people of the lake-village had had to chop down all those trees and lop off the branches with their stone axes, which, as Joe reminded us, were not the best sort of cutting tools, and bring every faggot and every stone and every beam across the water in their canoes, you will see it must have been a great piece of work for them. The farmer and his men had a stiff job to pull the mound to pieces and clear it away; but these old people, we may be sure, had a much harder task in building it.”

Joe said that, perhaps, they floated out the tree-trunks on the water--that would be easier than putting them on the canoes.

“That’s right,” said Uncle John. “When they had got the foundation of stones and faggots laid, they made rafts of the trees and towed them out and loaded them up with stones and so sank them upon the foundations; and then laid more trunks on these, until they got to the right height above the water.”

“Did you find any other things in the rubbish heap?” David asked.

“We found some bone harpoons for spearing fish, and a number of objects of stone, such as weights for sinking fishing nets, and some that were used, perhaps, as whorls for twisting thread in spinning, and some beads of jet and a number of bone needles; but not many arrows, and only two or three axe-heads, one of which was broken.”

“Why didn’t you find more weapons?” David asked; “I expect the people had many more, hadn’t they?” “I expect they had,” said Uncle John, “but I’m afraid I can’t tell you why no more were found. Perhaps the people went away to live somewhere else and took their belongings with them.”

“I wish we had been there when you were digging at the mound,” Dick said. “I suppose there isn’t another one anywhere about?”

“No,” said Uncle John. “I’m afraid there isn’t another one.”

_Chapter the Twenty-sixth_

_THE STORY OF TIG: How the Old Chief Died_

NOW it happened, when they all came home again from the hunting camp, that the old chief of the village fell ill. Caerig was his name, but the people always called him Old Chief, for he had been the head man of the village for many years, and they all honoured him because he had been a clever hunter in the past days and a brave fighter.

The women of the village attended to him in his sickness, and tried to cure him with the medicines made from wild plants which they gathered in the woods; but the medicines did no good, and Old Chief grew worse.

Then at last two sons of the old chief went a journey to a village some distance away where a Medicine Man lived, and they took presents to the Medicine Man and begged him to come to cure the old chief’s sickness: and the Medicine Man came. He was a very old man, and he had a great name for skill in curing diseases. He brought with him his wand of magic wood and a bone rattle, but no medicines, though it was said of him that he could make more powerful medicines than any that the women made. He went into the old chief’s hut, and sat by him for a long time without speaking. Then he got up and walked solemnly round the bed from left to right three times, making signs with his wand and shaking his rattle. Tig and some of the others were waiting and listening outside the hut, and only the old chief’s sons and some of the older men were allowed inside. Then the Medicine Man said that an evil spirit was troubling Old Chief, and unless he could scare it away, the chief would die. The Medicine Man began to chant a song, shaking his rattle and beating on the ground with his wand; and the old chief lay groaning in pain, and the people cried and groaned also. At last the Medicine Man said that no more could be done that night; but that on the morrow he would work a stronger spell against the evil spirit. But in the night Old Chief died.

Then in the morning the news spread about that the old chief was dead; and the women who had attended him in his sickness stood around the hut moaning and wailing, and went crying up and down the village. And all the people mourned for him. Then after two days they carried his body to the top of a hill beyond the village, and built a funeral pyre of faggots and burned his body in the fire. This was done according to the rule of the Medicine Men, of whom there were three present to take part in the funeral. They gathered the ashes together and put them into an urn and then carried the urn to a place that they had chosen. In the meantime the people had built up another great fire; and they brought an ox, and killed it and roasted it in the fire, and made a great feast on the hill-top beside the fire, and all the people sat down and feasted at the funeral feast of the old chief. Then the Medicine Men bade the people approach to lay the gifts in the grave. They brought food from the feast and set it in little vessels beside the urn, because they believed that the chief’s spirit would need food for refreshment in the spirit world; and they brought his spear and his axe and his bow and arrows and his shield, and laid them in the grave; and they brought his favourite dog and killed it there, and laid its body beside the urn, so that it might attend its master in the world of spirits. Then when this was done, the Medicine Men made the people bring stones to raise a cairn over the urn. First they laid large flat stones, building them like a little chamber about the urn; then they laid six large blocks in a circle all round, and set others within the circle and piled them up into a great heap. These stones they brought from the river bed in the valley and carried them up across the hill-side to build the cairn. The building of the cairn was a work of several days; and every day until the work was finished, the women mourned and wailed in the village at sunset.

At last, on the day that the cairn was finished, the men of the village met together in council to choose one to be chief in the place of Caerig. Then Arsan, the old man, stood up and said:

“Garff is the man among us who is fittest to be our chief; for he is an able man and skilful, whether for hunting or for battle; and he is a man wise in council and the master of many cattle. Shall we not do well to choose him to be our chief?”

And the men said, “We shall do well.”

Then Garff stood up and said, “It is too much honour that you do me, friends, for I am a plain man and little skilled in speaking. But if you choose me to be your leader, I will strive to do my best for the good of all, whether in the hunt or in battle.”

So they chose Garff to be chief, and from that day he was the head man among the people and took the chief place at the councils. And when any strangers from other villages came with messages, they were taken to Garff’s hut to deliver their message and to seek his protection.

_Chapter the Twenty-seventh_

_How Tig chose a Wife from among the Lake People_

AFTER his first visit to the Lake Village Tig went sometimes to see his friends there, always taking care to carry with him a present of game of his own killing, a hare or some birds, for Eira and her mother; for he was glad that they should see what a clever hunter he was; and Eira showed him how well she could cook the meat that he brought, and was pleased when he praised her cookery. Dobran and Gaithel took him out fishing, but Tig did not care much for this. However, one day they promised to show him better sport, for a party was going up into their hunting-grounds to hunt deer in a manner of their own.

They all started very early in the morning and marched up into the hills. Then the men spread their party out into a long line, curved like the letter C, and swept across the hill-side with their dogs. Then they closed in, and beat the woods until the hunters on one side started a herd of deer. The deer dashed across the woodland valley and tried to escape on the other side, but the men of the further line turned them back and drove them into the woods again.

So the hunters kept the deer moving forward, always within the line, until they drove them to a narrow place near the end of the valley, where there was a big trap, a high double fence among the trees, made in the shape of a long V. The hunters closed in on the deer and drove them in at the broad open end of the fence, and then drove them on and on until the deer were enclosed in the narrow end, where the ground was soft and boggy, so that they could not leap out.

Then some of the hunters climbed over the fence, and speared or clubbed the poor animals that were standing up to their knees in the soft soil, panting and terror-stricken. In this manner in one day the hunters got eleven head of deer; but Tig thought it was not such fine sport as stalking a stag on the hills, though at the time of the drive, when they were heading the deer down through the woods, it was exciting work.

Then they carried home the deer that they had killed, and they all spent two or three days in feasting.

Another day when Tig and Gaithel were in the woods, they came to a valley where a stream flowed quietly along and the trees grew on the banks near the water’s edge.

“This is the beavers’ valley,” said Gaithel, “they have their village here. They are our brothers, for they build their houses beside the water even as we do; but we hunt them and kill them although we do call them our brothers.”

The beavers’ home was in a pond. They had made the pond by laying a dam of logs across the stream to hold back the water; and there they had built their huts with round tops of interlaced branches that showed above the water. Tig saw where they had cut down many tall trees on the banks and gnawed them into logs with their strong teeth.

“Do you set traps for the beavers?” Tig asked.

“Yes, we trap them; we bait the traps with fresh wood--fresh sweet bark is what they like. Sometimes we hunt them in the winter, when their ponds are frozen over. We go and batter at the huts with clubs. Then the beavers rush out of their huts under the ice and make for holes that they have in the banks; but we try to head them off from these by banging on the ice, and make them come up to breathe at holes in the ice. They must come up after a time to get breath. Then we stand at the holes and try to spear them. We often scatter dry husks over the holes: the stuff floats on the water, and then the beavers cannot see us waiting by the holes, and we catch them if we are quick.”

“Have you many beavers about here?” Tig asked.

“There are not so many as there were once. My grandfather can remember when there used to be nine or ten beavers’ dams in these valleys where there are only three or four now.”

“They are getting scarce in our woods too,” said Tig, “we have hunted them so much.”

The next day Tig went home to his own village and got some of his neighbours to help him build a new hut and bring into it the necessary things. Then he went again to the Lake Village, taking presents for Eira’s father and mother, and he asked Eira to be his wife. Then they were married according to the custom of her people, and there was a great feast at the wedding, and the men ran races, and they all danced many dances. And afterwards Tig took Eira home to the new hut in his own village.

_Chapter the Twenty-eighth_

_DICK AND HIS FRIENDS: The Boys’ Bows and Arrows_

WHEN the boys went out after this reading, they got their bows and arrows. By this time the bows were finished. Dick had given to each of the others two arrows out of his set that came from London. These were well made with blunt metal heads fitting like caps. Besides these Joe had made himself six arrows, and the other two four each. For heads they had nails, filed down flat on two sides to make them fit into the shaft, and sharpened at the point. The great difficulty had been to get straight sticks, and though they agreed that it was not a real hunter’s way of doing it, they had cut lengths from a thin piece of hard-wood board, with a fine saw, and then trimmed and sand-papered these to make them round and smooth. To fix in the heads they made a cut, deep enough to take the nail, and then wrapped it with fine string and glued this well over. When they had fixed the feathers, the arrows were complete, and each marked his own. Dick had a V for his mark, Joe a cut between two dots, and David a dot between two cuts. The gardener made them a target out of bands of straw, and they practised at it a good deal. But one day they made up their minds to try to shoot something that might be called “game,” and they went off to the heath. Each took a different way, but they agreed to meet at the hut afterwards, with whatever they should have bagged.

Joe went off to a place near the edge of the wood, where there were generally rabbits playing about, and his plan was to creep up near enough to get a shot at once, if he could do so without scaring them, but if not, to hide among the bushes and wait for them coming out of their burrows.

David crept through the furze looking out for birds. He saw an old blackbird hopping about under the bushes, and he shot at it; but it flew away with a great deal of noise, as if laughing at David, who had to spend a long time getting back his arrow from among a lot of prickly brambles. There were numbers of yellow-hammers perching about on the furze bushes and crying out: _A very, very little bit of bread and no chee-e-e-ese_, and a pair of bold little stone-chats that kept flying round calling _a-tick, a-tick_, but David did not want to shoot at them. Then a family of green woodpeckers, father and mother and four young ones, came flying across from the woods; and David was so keen on watching them that he forgot he was a hunter; so when he got to the hut he was empty-handed. He was the first in, but after a while Joe came, and he also had got nothing.

“I nearly shot a starling,” he said; “there was a flock of them running about on the grass, and I shot right into the middle of them. I wish I had got one, for it says in that book of mine that a starling is the best bird to get when you are learning to stuff, as it is easy to skin--I say, it would be fun to shoot a rabbit and skin it, and try to cure the skin!”

Just then Dick came in. He had his pockets stuffed out, and the others wanted to know what he had got. He said they were to make a fire and then he would show them; so they went out and collected sticks and made a fire in the fireplace outside the hut. Then Dick brought out of his pocket six potatoes, and said that was all his game. “I never saw anything to shoot at,” he said, “but the men in a field over there are taking up potatoes and they gave me these for twopence, and would have let me have more if I could have stowed them away. I thought we could roast them in the ashes.”

But Dick had something else to show. He had found some pieces of wool, torn off sheep’s fleeces, hanging to the thorn bushes on the heath, and had gathered them all up.

“To-morrow I shall go and try to get some more,” he said, “and when I have got enough, I shall make a spindle, if I can find out exactly what it ought to be like, and see if I can spin some yarn: and if I can spin the yarn, I shall rig up a loom and have a try at weaving a piece of cloth. There isn’t much chance of being able to do it right, of course, but it is good fun trying.”

_Chapter the Twenty-ninth_

_THE STORY OF TIG: How the Lake People brought Tidings of War_

ONE day when Tig was sitting at the door of his hut trimming sticks for arrows, he heard the dogs barking, so he went to the gate and looked out. He saw three men coming up the hill, and when they came nearer he saw that they were some of the Lake Village people, friends of his. He went out to meet them, and brought them into the village and took them to his father’s hut, because they said they had brought an important message.

But first, Gofa and some of the other women brought food and set it before the visitors, and they ate and drank. Then when Garff had called together the elder men of the village, he asked the leader of the party to give his message.

Then the man, whose name was Dileas, stood up and said:

“For many months past, O chief, our folk have been sorely molested by the people that dwell to the southward of our borders, across the waters of the big river. Their men have trespassed upon our hunting-grounds, and when we have resisted them, they have fought and several of our men have been slain. And now of late they have taken to hunting openly upon our side of the water, coming up the river in their canoes, in bands, and daring us to drive them back.

“Yet have we worse than this to tell. For nine days ago a party of their men attacked our cowherds, who were tending the cattle on the hill-side; and they drove off the cattle and slew one of the cowherds that was an old man, and carried off two young men to their village. But a young man who escaped, being a swift runner, fled home and brought us these tidings. And on the next day our chief sent me and these two, my companions, to the people across the big river, to make complaint of the matter. And we saw their chief, sitting with the old men of the tribe; and we spoke civilly to them, saying that doubtless the wrong was done by some of their young men that were headstrong and perhaps ignorant; and that if they would restore our cattle and release our brothers and make payment for the death of the other, and would swear by their gods to trouble us no more, then we would not seek vengeance for blood, but would be at peace with them and keep faith.