34

Quite as common, perhaps, as the conical summer wind-break was
the simple lean-to, constructed by planting three or four sticks in line
at an angle of about 50 degrees and covering them with spruce bark,
boughs, or hides.

In 1924 there were several wooden houses, frame or log, at both
McLeod lake and Fort Grahame. At the former place there was also a
rectangular lodge of poles whose walls and roof were covered with spruce
bark. The sheathing extended over the lower half of the walls only, the
upper parts being left open (Plate VII).

The furniture inside these dwellings was naturally meagre. Mackenzie
sums it up thus:

“Their kettles are also made of watape (woven spruce roots), which
is so closely woven that they never leak, and they heat water in them,
by putting red-hot stones into it. There is one kind of them, made of
spruce-bark, which they hang over the fire, but at such a distance as to

Piate VIII

75941

Wooden spoon and a skin scraper made from the shoulder-bone of a moose.

receive the heat without being within reach of the blaze; a very tedious
operation. They have various dishes of wood and bark; spoons of horn
and wood, and buckets; bags of leather and net-work, and baskets of
bark, some of which hold their fishing-tackle, while others are contrived
to be carried on the back.”

In post-European times the Sekani substituted birch bark for spruce
bark in their cooking vessels and baskets, although, unlike the Beaver
Indians, they never replaced. their spruce-bark canoes with birch-bark
ones. For torches they used bundles of jackpine twigs instead of rolls

1 Mackenzie: Op. cit., pp. 206-7.

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