Katharine Elizabeth Dopp

How do you think Firekeeper made the skin water bag?

Where did the Cave-men get water? When did they need to carry water?

Name as many things as you can that they could use for carrying water before they learned to make water vessels.

What do we use to carry water? Where does the water that we drink come from?

The Cave-men watched the old man and Sharpeyes until they passed out of sight.

Then the men went out on the hills, while the women and children dug roots near the cave.

After a while they climbed a large oak tree and sat on its strong spreading branches.

Then Brighteyes asked Firekeeper about the bag, and how she happened to make it.

All the children liked to hear Firekeeper talk.

She often told them of the brave deeds of their fathers.

She often showed them how to make useful things that their mothers knew how to make.

They all wanted to hear her now, so they tried to get close beside her.

She told them of Sharptooth and the way she got water by drinking it from the stream.

Then she told how Bodo got fire, and how people began to live around the fireplace.

As soon as people learned to work together, they often went far away from the stream.

When the women went berrying far from the river, they became thirsty before they got home.

One day they found water in a hollow gourd that had been filled by the rain.

They took the gourd with them when they went home and used it for carrying water.

Afterward they learned to hollow out gourds and to use them for water vessels.

Sometimes they left part of the vine on the gourd and used the vine for a carrying strap.

When they pulled the gourd off from the vine, they had to make a strap for the gourd.

Sometimes the gourd broke and spilled the water, so they wove a coarse netting of wild vines and covered it with that.

All the children had seen gourd water vessels and had used them many times.

Brighteyes had learned to make the netting, so Firekeeper did not stop to show how it was made.

All were anxious to hear about the skin bag, so Firekeeper went on with her story.

She told them that she had been thinking of the dry rocky country for several days.

She knew that the men must pass through it, and she feared they would die of thirst.

She was afraid to trust the gourd water vessel at such a time as this.

She wished the gourd were as strong as skin.

Then she wondered if she could make a skin bag.

The next day when she was skinning a hyena she happened to think of a way to do it.

Instead of cutting the skin straight down the breast line, she tried another way.

After cutting off the feet and the head, she loosened the skin and slipped it off almost whole.

She scraped it and softened it with fat, and tied up the legs with straps.

Then she fastened a strap to the bag.

It was finished just in time for the men to take it with them.

The story was now ended, so the women and children got down from the tree and started back to the cave.

THINGS TO DO