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These the old Sand-Spirit could read at his leisure, and do what he thought best for each of his various petitioners. When the time for his return arrived, Wassamo warned his people that they should not follow him nor attempt to take note how he disappeared. He then took the moose-skin sacks filled with tobacco, and bade farewell to all but Netawis.
The conjurer continued his song at intervals and it was occasionally taken up by those without. In this manner an hour and a half elapsed; but at length our attention, which had begun to flag, was roused by the violent shaking of the conjuring-house. It was instantly whispered round the circle that at least one devil had crept under the moose-skin.
And seizing it, and howling furiously the name of his brother after a fashion which no one could understand, Aa-chowwa'n! and bidding him begone, he rushed out into the night, until he came to Marten, to whom he gave the food, and, wrapping him up well in the moose-skin, bade him wait a while. And the villagers thought the chief's wife was indeed a very great conjurer.
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.
Going to the stage, he took down his five-foot snowshoes, slipped his moccasined feet into the thongs, and with his gun resting in the hollow of his bemittened hand, and the sled's hauling-line over his shoulder, strode off through the vaulted aisles between the boles of the evergreens; while through a tiny slit in the wall of his moose-skin home two loving eyes watched the stalwart figure vanishing among the trees.
And the face above the moose-skin shirt was stricken with a sudden envy. Without any telling, he knew just how his pardner's heart had failed him, when it came to turning his tattered back on the possibilities of the Klondyke. "Oh, I'm comin' back soon's I get a grub-stake."
Pendants hang from the nose and also from the ears, which are split in infancy and drawn down by weights till they flap at last against the shoulders. The rest of the equipment answers to this fantastic decoration: a shirt bedaubed with vermilion, wampum collars, silver bracelets, a large knife hanging on the breast, moose-skin moccasons, and a belt of various colors always absurdly combined.
A man under Muckluck's window, dressed in a moose-skin shirt, straw hat, broadcloth trousers, and carpet slippers, in one hand a tin pail, in the other something tied in a handkerchief, called out lustily to a ragged individual, cleaving a way through the throng, "Got your stuff aboard?" "Yes, goin' to get it off. I ain't goin' home till next year."
Soon they were deep in its shadows, pushing along the edge of a muskeg which they skirted carefully in order not to be hampered by its treacherous boggy footing. Jessie wore a caribou-skin capote with the fur on as a protection against the cold wind. Her moccasins were of smoked moose-skin decorated with the flower-pattern bead embroidery so much in use among the French half-breeds of the North.
The two then stripped boughs of balsam with which to carpet all one end of it. They unharnessed the dogs, and laid the sledge across one end of the clear space, covering it with branches in order to keep the dogs from gnawing the moose-skin wrapper. It was already quite dark. But at this point Sam returned with fuel.
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