Stories of American Life and Adventure | Page 4

fields. In these fields the Indians planted corn, beans, pumpkins,
and tobacco, and a plant something like a sunflower, which is called an
artichoke. Of the root of this artichoke they made a kind of bread.
For many miles there were no good canoe trees near the water. They
had all been picked out and used. Henry and Keketaw traveled twenty
miles into a deep woods, and chose a tree that would make a good
canoe, and that stood near a stream which ran into the James River.
The first thing they did was to break down young trees and boughs, and
build themselves a brush tent. They made a bed out of dry leaves. The
first night they had nothing to eat, for they had no time to shoot any
game. The next morning they were too hungry to sleep late, and they
knew that squirrels are early risers. Soon after daylight the Indian boy
killed a squirrel with an arrow. Having no fire, they ate it without
cooking; for, when one is a savage, one must not be too nice.
How should they get a fire? They first took a piece of dry wood, which
they scraped flat with stones. Then, with a blow of his tomahawk of
deer's horn, Keketaw made a round hole in the wood. One end of a dry
stick was placed in this hole. The other end was supported in the
hollow of a shell which Keketaw held in his hand.
The string to Henry's bow was made of one of the cords or sinews of a
deer's leg. He wound this once round the stick. With his left hand,
Keketaw then put some dry moss about the stick where it entered the

hole in the dry wood.
When all was ready, Henry drew his bow to and fro like a saw.
Keketaw pressed the shell down on the upper part of the stick. The
bow-string holding the stick made it whirl in the hole beneath. At first
this seemed to produce no effect. After a while the rapid rubbing of the
piece of wood in the hole made heat. Presently a very thin thread of
smoke began to come up through the little heap of moss about the stick.
Henry was now pretty well out of breath, but he sawed the bow faster
than ever. At last the moss began to smolder and to show fire.
Keketaw then withdrew the smoking stick, and gathered the moss
together. Lying down by it, and putting his arm about it, the Indian lad
began to blow it gently. The smoldering fire increased until a little blue
flame, which he could barely see, appeared. Keketaw now added some
very thin paper-like bits of dry bark and some small twigs to the pile of
smoking moss. These caught fire, and sent up a straw-colored flame.
Henry put on larger twigs until there was at last a crackling blaze.
Taking lighted sticks from this fire, the boys made a fire all round the
base of a large tree from which they meant to get the canoe. This fire
they kept going constantly for two days. They even got up at night to
put dead boughs on, it.
[Illustration: Burning down a Tree.]
On the third night of their stay in camp, they didn't lie down at the
usual time, for the tree was burned nearly through. About two o'clock
in the morning a little breeze rustled in the leaves of the great tree.
Slowly at first, then more and more rapidly, the tree fell with a
tremendous crashing sound, until with a final thundering roar it lay flat
upon the ground.
Sleepy as the boys were, they did not lie down for the night until they
had built a new fire near the trunk of the tree. Having no ax to chop
with, they had to burn the log in two. They put the fire at a place that
would cut off enough of the tree trunk to make a canoe.

The next day they built up this new fire, and then went fishing in the
neighboring stream with their bone fishhooks, and lines made of the
Spanish bayonet leaf. In two days after the fall of the tree they had
burned off the log that was to make their canoe, and had scraped off all
the bark with shells.
They then lighted little fires on top of the log, and, when these had
charred the wood for an inch or more in depth in any place, they
removed the fire and scraped away the charcoal. Then they built
another little fire in the same place. These little fires were made with
gum taken from the pine trees.
By burning and scraping they gradually dug out the inside of their