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By Root 404 0

” “All right,” I tell him as we start running, making noise with the little sack and backpack. And I must have been fourteen years old when we went walking over that way. There’s a huge swamp over that way. “Boy, we’ll hang these up by hand and then come after our snares tomorrow,” I tell him. “No,” he says. “No. We’ll hang a certain amount here so you can make some kills. Different things must be taken into consideration about the trail, the rabbit trail,” he says. “I’ll teach you as we do this. It won’t be necessary for us to come after them tomorrow,” he said. So, this swamp was so gigantic that as we hung snares there it [seemed like] we hung snares throughout the whole thing. “Okay, come start out. Go on. You go over towards that way. Come on. Go this way here,” he says. “And then slide the [snares into shape] while you are walking,” he says. So when I finally get over there he’s waiting for me himself. There he told me to walk along over where I had been placing the [snares]. Confusion. I didn’t know where I had put them down. So when I got there, “How could it be possible for me to backtrack that way,” I tell him. “Come on,” he says here.

[37] “Tell me what’s to be said about this.” Holy buckets! Golly, after a little while there was a rabbit trying to get free here. Then I killed him with a blow to the head. So I put him in the bag here as we walked along. Boy, again there was another one over there. “Put him in the bag.” Thus, we ended up carrying a lot of those rabbits. Wow! They were all stuffed in the bag. Unreal! “The carrying is overwhelming me,” I tell him. “Okay, I’ll carry it for you,” he tells me. Then he carried it. Boy, was I ever tired. It was completely dark way out there when he blew on his finger to see if we were lost. “Please get us out of here,” I tell him. “No,” he says. “You are so concerned with getting lost that you are oblivious to the fact that your house is so nearby,” he tells me. And as we walked along, my house was right there. “My house is there. Hurry up.” “No,” he says. “Let’s leave,” he says. Golly was I tired while walking around [my house] about six times. Then our walking around was sufficient because these rabbits, while we were [doing that], I brought in eight more of those rabbits, white rabbits as they are called. Wow! My parents are going to be happy when they get back. Nothing. And it was still early in the morning when they built the cooking fire. Boy! As for myself, I had been eating those white rabbits when we had supper. And again in the morning, then too. Well we never had too much. We were quite poor. It was more like we never had enough. But we were never given that food. That’s for sure.

[38] And regarding the fish, that’s how we fished with poles. That’s all we ate in the summer. And in the fall they saved up the rice, maybe four partners would finish it. That was our diet. They also planted potatoes. They planted a variety of things. They only kept things there in the cellar below, underneath the house. They only had certain kinds of things they could eat here. We would eat these things all winter, and in the spring there, and in the fall, we did that again to acquire a sufficient quantity of food wherever we would be and go snaring. And they killed deer too. The men were always leaving to go around hunting. Sometimes they would kill only one deer. So they all shared in that. Whatever amount they had was sufficient. So it is with all good things, the Indians did things properly, and fed their fellow Indians a little at a time. So it was enough with the way they used to be, the way they used to behave when they went hunting. And with the rabbit snaring, they would bring a rabbit. Then they would all go snaring there themselves.

The Indian Was Gifted

[39] This is how I became so knowledgeable myself about what the Indians used to do. Then I became learned myself about this which I saw them doing and listened to them too over there, my mother, my grandmothers. They told me about things like the Indian’s good fortunes. Then I too became able myself to tell you more