398 
pounds and captured with snares. Their dwellings were conical 
tipis covered with bark or brush, or, at times, rectangular huts of 
the same materials; in summer they were often satisfied with simple 
lean-tos. They used baskets of woven spruce roots for cooking, 
spoons of wood, or of goat or sheep horn, and dishes of wood or 
birch bark. Spruce-bark canoes’ facilitated summer travelling; in 
winter the Indians wore snow-shoes and their women dragged crude 
toboggans made from the leg-skins of the caribou, for dogs served 
only for hunting. Of tools there were stone adzes and hammers, 
chisels of antler, awls of bone, and knives with blades of stone or 
beaver teeth. 
In all these traits, and also in their dress, the Kaska closely 
resembled other Athapaskan tribes to the east and south. Men 
wore no breech-cloth, apparently, although in winter, like the Sekani, 
they sometimes tied the ends of the robe between the legs. Their 
usual costume was a skin shirt pointefl in front and behind and fitted 
with a hood in cold weather, long leggings fastened into a belt above 
and sewn to the moccasins below, mittens, and a robe of caribou or 
woven rabbit skin. Shirts, leggings, and moccasins were often pro- 
fusely ornamented with porcupine-quill embroidery. Women carried 
their babies in bags of beaver or other skins padded with moss and 
rabbit fur. 
Typically Athapaskan, also, was much of the social life. Kaska 
girls passed a period in seclusion and submitted to the same restraints 
as girls in the Mackenzie basin. Whether boys of corresponding 
age fasted for guardian spirits has not been recorded, but is scarcely 
open to doubt because the tribe held the same beliefs about animals, 
and its medicine-men practised their art in much the same way as 
other Athapaskans. In the new Felly River band, and probably 
among the Kaska also, the prospective bridegroom served the girhs 
parents for a season before the marriage feast, and thereafter he and 
his parents-in-law avoided all speech with one another. Women 
were treated kindly, but performed most of the drudgery inevitable 
in a life of constant movement from one hunting ground to another. 
The dead were wrapped in skins in early times, and left on the 
ground beneath a covering of brush. 
1 Moo.=ie, thougi* plentiful to-d.TV, peoiu 1o Imve been rare or absent in iire-Etiropean times, and 
the cano(^ e<i\ere(l with moosehirle. now built oceasioiially b\' the Kttskti, are mndelled on iln* olrler 
Eprucc-bark canoes. 
