13 
trees and find nourishment in the sap. But the latter half of winter offered 
no such resources, and when fish and game seemed lacking families often 
perished of starvation. So the Ojibwa called this period the manido or 
spirit moon, the moon when the supernatural man-eating giant, the windigo , 
attacked their camps and destroyed the occupants. 
Let us follow the activities of the people moon by moon. From 
December to March the families were scattered in their hunting-grounds. 
Every morning at daybreak the men set out to hunt moose, deer, porcupine, 
and other game, returning home only at dark. Meanwhile the women and 
children set snares for rabbits and grouse in the vicinity of their camps, 
and occasionally fished through holes in the ice of the frozen lakes. The 
daily visit to these snares occupied only three or four hours, and the women 
spent the remainder of the day mending clothes and snow-shoes, and 
drying in the smoke of the camp-fire whatever meat the family had 
accumulated. The camps of the individual families were usually several 
miles apart, but from time to time the men extended their wanderings into 
the hunting-grounds of neighbours to find out how they were faring. 
The longer days and melting snow of March brought the hunting 
season to an end. The Indians then packed their possessions to the maple 
groves and tapped the trees for their syrup. If a grove were large three 
or four families might camp side by side, or in close proximity; if small, 
one family camped there alone. While the women collected the syrup, 
and in spare moments stripped off the inside bark of the cedar tree to make 
bags, the men speared fish through the ice of the lakes, and compensated 
by hours of idleness and relaxation for the strenuous hunting of the winter. 
The women had few idle hours, though their labours were comparatively 
easy. They directed the flow of the maple sap over a large sheet of birch 
bark, where the warm sun hardened it to the consistency of treacle. To 
harden it still further they used several methods. A hot sun alone would 
reduce it to a sort of toffee, or it could be evaporated at night in front of a 
fire. More often, perhaps, the women boiled it in clay pots directly over the 
fire, or else in vessels of birch bark by the use of hot stones 1 . Impatient 
members of the family sometimes dipped into the syrup heated cones made 
from a soft, greenish stone, when the syrup crystallized on the stone and 
could be scraped away with a knife. By one or other of these methods 
the sap was converted into sugar and stored away for future use in baskets 
of birch bark or bags of cedar bark. Each woman generally tried to 
equalize the weight of her baskets by balancing a pole across a log, tying 
a stone to one end and the basket of sugar to the other; but since there 
were no stones of standard weight, and the women merely picked up such 
as suited their purpose, the baskets of different families all weighed 
differently. 
About the middle of April, after the women had stored away all their 
maple sugar in pits lined and covered with birch bark and heaped over 
with earth, a few Indians travelled south with furs and sugar to barter 
1 Miss Densmore (44th Ann. Rept., Bur. of Am. Arch., 1926-27, p. 308, footnote, Washington, 192S) 
cites still another Indian method of extracting the sugar not known to my informants in Georgian bay. 
The natives would “freeze the syrup repeatedly in shallow basins and throw off the ice.’' 
4294— 2J 
