A shred of rabbit-skin means
starvation. And so on in variety useless in any but an ethnological
work.
[Illustration 1: A short journey.]
[Illustration 2: A medium journey.]
[Illustration 3: A long journey.]
The Ojibways' tongue is soft, and full of decided lisping and sustained
hissing sounds. It is spoken with somewhat of a sing-song drawl. We
always had a fancy that somehow it was of forest growth, and that its
syllables were intended in the scheme of things to blend with the woods
noises, just as the feathers of the mother partridge blend with the
woods colours. In general it is polysyllabic. That applies especially
to concepts borrowed of the white men. On the other hand, the Ojibways
describe in monosyllables many ideas we could express only in phrase.
They have a single word for the notion, Place-where-an-animal-slept-
last-night. Our "lair," "form," etc., do not mean exactly that. Its
genius, moreover, inclines to a flexible verb-form, by which adjectives
and substantives are often absorbed into the verb itself, so that one
beautiful singing word will convey a whole paragraph of information. My
little knowledge of it is so entirely empirical that it can possess small
value.
In concluding these desultory remarks, I want to tell you of a very
curious survival among the Ojibways and Ottawas of the Georgian Bay. It
seems that some hundreds of years ago these ordinarily peaceful folk
descended on the Iroquois in what is now New York, and massacred a
village or so.
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