CHAI*. xix. AN INDIAN LODGE. 3'25 



a bag, and produce it on the occasion of a feast. They 

 make robes of rabbit skin where that animal is found, but 

 generally the clothing is made exclusively of caribou 

 leather. The stem of the council pipe is about sixteen 

 inches long and ornamented with eagles' feathers, five or 

 six in number, sloping towards the bowl, and, like the 

 western tribes, they mix the roasted inner bark of the red 

 willow with the tobacco. After half an hour's conversa- 

 tion in Otelne's lodge, I invited a good many of them to 

 come to my tent on the following morning, and made my 

 escape into the open air, almost ill with the close atmo- 

 sphere of a birch-bark lodge containing twenty-five 

 persons, twenty- three of them smelling very unpleasantly of 

 seal oil, which the aroma of the best Virginia inhaled without 

 intermission by the other two was incapable of concealing. 



The ventilation of the lodge would have been tolerable, 

 if a number of men and girls who could not get in had 

 not stopped up the doorway, and closed with their fat 

 and greasy faces every crevice in the bark. 



The heat would have been less insupportable if Otelne's 

 wife had not been so anxious to cook a horribly fishy 

 duck that was stuck on a stick, before the fire, and if the 

 thermometer had not been seventy-five degrees in the 

 shade in the open air. Weighing these matters and 

 feeling their weight, I rushed out into the air without 

 ceremony, but not without tumbling over a dozen curs 

 which had been drawn together by the unusual 

 concourse of visitors. 



My brother remained for an hour in the lodge, making 

 a water-colour sketch of the interior, taking advantage of 

 an opportunity which might not occur again. When he 



