Doc’s prestige, among the Indians who remained in the town, was enormous. He cured their simple ailments by putting them to bed and refusing to let them eat—a sure remedy, he privately assured us, for every human ill—and with his dowsing rod he discovered a lead mine half a mile from the village. The only lead mines in that western country belonged to the Sacs and Foxes; and the nearest, until Doc used his dowsing rod, was fifteen miles away. When, therefore, Doc unearthed another close at hand, the Sacs were grateful. The shamans permitted him to take the first degree of the Midewiwin, which made him an assistant shaman and gave him the right to wear a headdress made out of buffalo horns, eagles’ feathers, strips of red flannel and braided rattlesnake skins.

Indians, we found, own all their property in common, even to making equal division of the food they kill and raise. Thus some are worse than lazy, knowing they will be fed by the harder workers. Some, too, are unfortunate, forever hooking fish that get away, knocking over deer that somehow escape, and felling bear trees from which the bear has decamped. Others are helpless or incapable. Thus the competents, among Indians, are forever doomed to see the fruits of their labor gobbled up by gluttons and incompetents. Unfortunately for ourselves, Verrieul, Doc and I were competents. We worked for that Indian tribe like slaves, helping to get food for the entire town, and enough to make pemmican for future use—pemmican that necessitated the drying of elk and deer meat over frames, pounding it to bits on rocks, and packing it in deerskin containers with bear fat—that necessitated, too, cutting wood for the fires, making deerskin kettles, frying bear fat into grease. Between times we turned our hands to light chores such as collecting birch and elm bark for utensils, keeping moccasins and snowshoes in repair, making cartridges, tending and feeding horses, and cutting down trees to get at bears and raccoons.

January was on us and gone in a never-ending round of labor. In February we made utensils and weapons in preparation for sugar making and the spring migration of buffaloes. In March we made sugar, carrying sap buckets from trees to kettles until it seemed to each one of us that we had walked a million miles.