37

other times they heated some stones in a small trench, laid fireweed leaves
above them, the meat on the leaves, a covering of bark above the meat,
and finally hot ashes. Hunters away from camp occasionally boiled their
meat in the stomach of a mountain goat by encompassing its upper edge
with a green twig and filling this novel bag with water.

In their caches, too, the Long Grass people displayed more variety
than their fellow tribesmen. Although they preferred to store their meat
on wooden platforms raised on posts or fastened in trees, the absence of
trees throughout much of the Groundhog country often forced them to
build high platforms of stones. Hunters who intended to return for their
meat within a few days piled it on the ground and covered it with a blanket;
placed it in crude hampers made of interlaced willow boughs concealed
under a layer of brush; or merely set a burning log beside it and set a
few traps.

TOOLS AND WEAPONS

The old tools and weapons have long since passed out of use. Even
in Mackenzie’s day they had been modified through the infiltration of iron
from the Pacific coast.

“Their arms consist of bows made of cedar, six feet in length, with
a short iron spike at one end, and serve occasionally as a spear. Their
arrows are well made, barbed, and pointed with iron, flint, stone, or bone;
they are feathered, and from two to two feet and a half in length. They
have two kinds of spears, but both are double edged, and of well polished
iron; one of them is about twelve inches long, and two wide; the other
about half the width, and two-thirds of the length; the shafts of the
first are eight feet in length, and the latter six. They have also spears
made of bone. Their knives consist of pieces of iron, shaped and handled
by themselves. Their adzes are something like our adze, and they use
them in the same manner as we employ that instrument. They were,
indeed, furnished with iron in a manner that I could not have supposed,
and plainly proved to me that their communication with those, who com-
municate with the inhabitants of the sea coast, cannot be very difficult.’’

The Carrier, Tahltan, Slave, and perhaps other Athapaskan tribes
tipped their bows with stone points, and the Sekani did likewise until they
obtained iron from the coast. McLeod Lake natives said that although
they preferred cedar for their bows, it was so difficult to obtain that they
generally used willow or balsam; and that in shooting they used the Medi-
terranean grip. Arrows, they added, were made of saskatoon or birch,
those for children being winged with two feathers laid flat, whereas hunt-
ers’ arrows had three half-feathers set on edge and fastened down with
Spruce gum and sinew. The same natives have a tradition that in war they
used a moose-jaw club, and an oblong wooden shield coated on the outside
with pitch and pebbles. Morice figures a curious kind of “ war or hunting

1 Mackenzie: Op. cit., p. 206.