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This is the time for oil-skin suits, dread-naughts, tarred trowsers and overalls, sea-boots, comforters, mittens, woollen socks, Guernsey frocks, Havre shirts, buffalo-robe shirts, and moose-skin drawers. Every man's jacket is his wigwam, and every man's hat his caboose. Perfect license is now permitted to the men respecting their clothing.
The men wore their wolf- and beaver-skin caps, with the gay-tasselled ear-flaps flying free, while on their feet were the moose-skin moccasins and walrus-hide muclucs of the north. Here and there a woman was in moccasins, though the majority danced in frail ball-room slippers of silk and satin.
The sulky crackling of half-frozen hides told him that the chief's moose-skin lodge had been struck, and even then was being rammed and jammed into portable compass. The chief was his son, stalwart and strong, head man of the tribesmen, and a mighty hunter. As the women toiled with the camp luggage, his voice rose, chiding them for their slowness. Old Koskoosh strained his ears.
Its want of depth is compensated however by its diameter which frequently exceeds three feet. It is covered with moose-skin parchment, painted with rude figures of men and beasts having various fantastic additions, and is beat with a stick. The seeseequay is merely a rattle formed by enclosing a few grains of shot in a piece of dried hide.
Wabishke, like most Indians, was a born trader, and he was quick to note the covetous glance that the white chechako cast toward his footgear. "Will you sell those?" asked Bill, pointing toward the moccasins. The Indian regarded them thoughtfully, and again the toes wriggled comfortably beneath the pliable moose-skin covering. Bill tried again.
"Just wait till I add up the figgers and weigh " He paused; he stooped; then he rose with something he had picked up from the floor beneath his feet. "What have you got, Ben?" It was Rock speaking. "Dam' if I know! There it is." The proprietor shoved a clean, new moose-skin gold-sack through the wicket. Rock examined the bag, then he lifted an inquiring gaze to Pierce Phillips.
I remained only long enough at Fort Ellice to complete a few changes in costume which the rapidly increasing cold rendered necessary. Boots and hat were finally discarded, the stirrup-irons were rolled in strips of buffalo skin,-the large moose-skin "mittaines" taken into wear, and immense moccassins got ready.
A moose-skin being then thrown over the frame secluded him from our view. He forthwith began to chant a kind of hymn in a very monotonous tone. The rest of the Indians, who seemed in some doubt respecting the powers of a devil when put in competition with those of a white man, ranged themselves around and watched the result with anxiety. Nothing remarkable occurred for a long time.
The father who loved his daughter too well to sell her as he would a beaver-trap or a moose-skin, or to compel her to become a wife, would have been glad to see her choose a protector from among the many Braves who solicited her affections.
Going to the bed, Dextry turned back the blankets, exposing four moose-skin sacks, wet and heavy, where he had thrown them. "There must have been twenty thousand dollars with what I gave Wheaton," said Glenister.
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