The Making Of A Canoe
by
Henry had a young Indian friend whose name was Keketaw. One day Keketaw said to him, “Let us go into the woods and make a canoe.”
“If we had an ax to cut down the trees,” said the white boy, “or an adz, such as they have at Jamestown, or if we could get a hatchet, we might make a canoe; but we have not even a little knife.”
“We will make a canoe in the Indian way,” said Keketaw. “I will show you how. Let us get ready.”
“What shall we do to get ready?” asked Henry.
“We must take our bows, and we must make many arrows, so as to get something to eat, and we must have fishing lines,” said Keketaw, “or we shall not be able to live in the woods.”
For some days the two boys were getting ready. It took them a long time to scrape a piece of bone into a fishhook by means of a beaver’s tooth set in a stick, but they made three of these hooks. They made some more hooks not so good as these by tying a splinter of bone to a little stick. Keketaw’s mother made fishing lines for them. She took the long leaves of the plant which we call Spanish bayonet, and separated these threads into a hard cord, rubbing them between her hand and her knee.
“We must have swords,” said Keketaw.
“We can cut our meat with this,” said Henry, pointing to a knife made of cane, such as the Indians called a pamesack.
“But the Monacans may come,” said Keketaw. “If we should see one sticking up his head, I should want a sword to fight him with; and if we should kill him, we could cut off his scalp with it;” and Keketaw’s eyes glistened a little at the thought of fetching home a Monacan’s scalp.
The Monacans were fierce Indians of a tribe living in the country west of the Powhatan Indians. They were deadly enemies of Keketaw’s tribe.
The two boys, by much slow work with stones and shells and beaver-tooth chisels, managed to scrape a wooden sword into shape. This, Henry was to wear at his back. Keketaw, for his part, found a piece of deer’s horn. He stuck it into a stick so that it made something like a small pickax. With this he said he could quickly break the head of a Monacan. It would also serve as a sort of hatchet.
The land round the village in which Keketaw lived had been cleared of trees. This had been done by burning the trees in order to make room for 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.