Then we would persuade them to
ladle out a little of the boiling sap into plates that we patted out of
the snow, which could always be found lingering in the hollows, at
sugar-makings. When it was still waxy and warm, we rolled up the cooled
syrup and ate it out of hand.
"In summer whole families would go to the bottom lands paw-paw
gathering. Winter nights there was story-telling in the huts. We had a
kind of corn, very small, that burst out white like a flower when it was
parched..."
"Pop-corn!" cried both the children at once. It seemed strange that
anything they liked so much should have belonged to the Mound-Builders.
"Why, that was what _we_ called it!" he agreed, smiling. "Our mothers
used to stir it in the pot with pounded hickory nuts and bears' grease.
Good eating! And the trading trips! Some of our men used to go as far as
Little River for chert which they liked better for arrow-points than our
own flints, being less brittle and more easily worked. That was a canoe
trip, down the Scioto, down the O-hey-yo, up the Little Tenasa as far as
Little River. There was adventure enough to please everybody.
"That bird-shaped mound," he pointed, "was built the time we won the
Eagle-Dancing against all the other villages.
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