It searches out
new trapping-grounds, new fisheries, it pays visits, it seems even to
enjoy travel for the sake of exploration. In winter a tepee of double
wall is built, whose hollow is stuffed with moss to keep out the cold;
but even that approximation of permanence cannot stand against the
slightest convenience. When an Indian kills, often he does not
transport his game to camp, but moves his camp to the vicinity of the
carcass. There are of these woods dwellers no villages, no permanent
clearings. The vicinity of a Hudson's Bay post is sometimes occupied
for a month or so during the summer, but that is all.
An obvious corollary of this is that tribal life does not consistently
obtain. Throughout the summer months, when game and fur are at their
poorest, the bands assemble, probably at the times of barter with the
traders. Then for the short period of the idling season they drift
together up and down the North Country streams, or camp for big
pow-wows and conjuring near some pleasant conflux of rivers. But when
the first frosts nip the leaves, the families separate to their
allotted trapping districts, there to spend the winter in pursuit of
the real business of life.
The tribe is thus split into many groups, ranging in numbers from
the solitary trapper, eager to win enough fur to buy him a wife, to a
compact little group of three or four families closely related in
blood. The most striking consequence is that, unlike other Indian
bodies politic, there are no regularly constituted and acknowledged
chiefs.
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