379 
The Sckaiii were, first and foremost, hunters, living on moose, 
caribou, bear, porcupine, beaver, and smaller game. They em- 
ployed the same wea})ons in hunting as in war, the bow and 
arrow, a cdub fashionefl from the jawbone of a moose, and a spear 
which for beaver-hunting was fitted with a toggle heafl; but their 
weapons procured them less game than their snares of babiclie, 
which they used for every animal from the marmot to the moose. 
Unlike the neighbouring Carrier, they hunted in winter and sum- 
mer alike, and resorted to fishing only when driven by sheer neces- 
sity.^ Then they used nets of willow bark or nettle-fibres, fish- 
hooks of bone set in a wooden shank, and tridents wielded from a 
canoe by the light of jackpine torches, or through the ice when the 
lakes were frozen over. Although the fish-baskets of more western 
tribes were unknown to them, they sometimes constructed weirs of 
brush near beaver-dams, broke the dams, and collected the stranded 
fish as the water flrained away. Even to-day they retain the scorn 
of true hunters for fishermen, and speak contemptuously of the 
Carrier as “ Fisheaters,” because fish predominated so largely in 
their diet. 
Like most Athapaskan tribes, the Sekani made far less use of 
stone than of wood, bone, horn, and antler. Indeed, their only stone 
implements seem to have been spear- and arrow-points, adze blades, 
and sometimes knives; in the last they often used beaver teeth. 
Their cooking vessels were made of spruce bark or woven spruce roots, 
their dishes of wood or bark, their spoons of goat horn or wood, and 
their bags of hide or babichc netting. Canoes and dwellings both 
had coverings of spruce bark. Living as they did by the chase, the 
Sekani had no permanent villages, but erected rough, conical lodges 
of poles covered with s]:)ruce-bark, or still cruder lean-tos overlaid 
with bark, skins, or brush. Food that they were unable to carry 
along with them they cached in trees (later, when they obtained 
steel axes, on specially built platforms) and carefully peeled the bark 
from the trunks to prevent the ascent of the crafty wolverine. All 
their clotliing, like that of most Canadian tribes, was of skin. Men 
wore a sleeveless shirt, at times laced together between the legs in 
lieu of a breech-cloth (which they adopted only after contact with 
1 Tlie Finlay anti Parsnii> rivers drain into the Arctic ocean, and, therefore, lack the salmon of the 
rivers that drain to the Pat-ific coast. 
