My uncle used to ask me a great many questions about
them which I remembered afterward. But at the time--you see there was a
girl, the daughter of my uncle's partner. She was all dusky red like the
tall lilies at Big Meadow, and when she ran in the village races with
her long hair streaming, they called her Flying Star.
"She used to bring our food to us when we opened up a new working, a
wolf's cry from the old,--sizzling hot deer meat and piles of boiled
corn on bark platters, and meal cakes dipped in maple syrup. I stayed on
till the time of tall weeds as my father had ordered, and then for a
while longer for the new working, which interested me tremendously.
First we brought hickory wood and built a fire on the exposed surface of
the ridge. Then we splintered the hot stone by throwing water on it, and
dug out the splinters. In two or three days we had worked clean through
the ledge of flint to the limestone underneath. This we also burnt with
fire, after we had protected the fresh flint by plastering it with clay.
When we had cleared a good piece of the ledge, we could hammer it off
with the stone sledges and break it up small for working.
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