You could find most of the old men around the bark houses doing a little light labor -- repairing arrows and bows, carving bowls and spoons of wood, and fitting handles to tools; and possibly some were fixing gourds with rattles of wild-cherry pits or Jack-in- the-pulpit seeds, or were indulging in the adornment of their persons with paint-stone or dyes of blood-root and sumac.

The old women would be out on another pathway that led to the flower banks where grew the herbs for medicine, scent, and dyes, the mallows and burdocks, ground cedar and pennyroyal, the wild mint and sage, and roots of sweet-flag and cicely.

And perhaps the old shaman might have been found on some lonesome footway looking for materials for ceremonials or charms or potions; love roots and lucky seeds, cedar and sweet-grass for incense.

AND MONOGRAPHS

INDIAN PATHS

The arrival of the canoes at nightfall after a day's fishing or oystering was the signal for the villagers to crowd the path to the landing-place, whence, in notassen of woven grass and basswood fiber, they aided the men to fetch the catch of oysters and fish; or when the whoop of the returning hunters echoed through the darkening forest, to run on the main trail to meet them, as on boughs of ash they carried the welcome venison to the smoking village fires, freshly kindled in anticipation of their success.

Around every such site the debris of these pursuits and the waste of feasts and meals lay scattered; scraps of skin and bones and charcoal sometimes dumped into a hollow when they became too numerous, and oyster-shells, fish-scales, and fish-bones when they became too objectionable of smell, deposited in the scooped-out oven pits or the holes in which the stores of corn, beans, and dried roots had been preserved over winter.