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He said, too, that these people had great quantities of this yellow metal. Their houses were decorated with it; their fur garments glistened with it; their council house was encrusted with it. "But," he added at the end, "the metal was too soft for spear points and arrowheads, too heavy for garments, and not good for food. As for houses, did they not have their deerskins and walrus-pelts?
He would repay Mimer's rebukes in right good fashion. He would frighten the little blacksmith dwarf until he was forced to cry for mercy. Clad in his forest dress of deerskins, with his hair as burnished gold blowing around his shoulders, Siegfried wandered away into the depths of the woodland. There he seized the silver horn which hung from his girdle and raised it to his lips.
Hendrick fashioned the large though light wooden framework of the shoes five feet long by eighteen inches broad and Oliver cut several deerskins into fine threads, with which, and deer sinews, Paul and the captain, under direction, filled in the net-work of the frames when ready. "Can you go after deer on such things?" asked the captain one night while they were all busy over this work.
Through the kindness of The'venet, who put his Post folk to work for us, the deerskins I had brought from Whale River were dressed and made up into sleeping bags and skin clothing, and other neces- saries were got ready for the long dog journey out. Christmas eve came finally, and with it komatik loads of Eskimos, who roused the place from its repose into comparative wakefulness.
He was well aware that the flesh of the moose was of the most savoury and delicate kind, and that the long pendulous upper lip is one of the "tit-bits" of the fur countries. Moreover, the fine hide would be an acceptable addition to their stock, as it is the best of all deerskins for mocassins, as well as snow-shoes articles which Basil knew would soon be needed.
The principal part of their winter dress was a long, wide coat of deerskins, reaching to the knees and trimmed with leather straps. They ate walrus, deer, and seal, and when they went sealing in the winter they fastened the lower edge of their coat to the snow by means of pegs.
And then, to furnish a leaven of truth to this mass of lies, he detailed, with such a relish as only an Irishman can feel in a happy incongruity, that the French, having no market in old France for deerskins, the chief commodity of barter that the Indians possessed, disposed of them to ships of the British colonies, from New York and elsewhere, lured thus to New Orleans, in exchange for English cloths and other British manufactures, which the French then surreptitiously furnished to the Indians of the British alliance, underselling them on every hand.
The great Indian chief, Massasoit, came with ninety of his bravest warriors, all gayly dressed in deerskins, feathers, and foxtails, with their faces smeared with red, white, and yellow paint. As a sign of rank, Massasoit wore round his neck a string of bones and a bag of tobacco. In his belt he carried a long knife.
At first, primitive peoples exchanged their commodities one for another, but a difficulty arose when out of a pair of possible traders one had something which the other wanted but the other had not. For example, if the arrow-maker had arrows to sell and wanted to buy fish, there obviously could be no bargain if his friend who wanted to buy arrows had only got deerskins to give in exchange.
So immense was this trade that the year after Boone's arrival at the Forks of Yadkin thirty thousand deerskins were exported from the province of North Carolina. In this very class of professional hunters, living like Indians, was thus bred the spirit of individual initiative and strenuous leadership in the great westward expansionist movement of the coming decade.
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