THE STORY OF TIG: How Gofa made Pottery

IT has been said before that Gofa did all the work of her own household, not only cooking the food, but also making the clothes, and preparing the skins out of which the clothes were made. Also she made the baskets for storing and carrying the food in, and the pottery, too; and when her stock of household pots had become low, she used to set to work to make a fresh lot. And this was how she did it. She went down into the valley to a place by the river where there was good clay. She took with her a large basket and a rough-and-ready trowel made out of the shoulder-blade of a deer. She dug out the clay, enough to fill the basket, and carried it home on her shoulders.

When Gofa was ready to make pottery, she first prepared the clay by mixing it with coarse sand, which also she had brought from the river-side. She moistened the clay with water when she added the sand, and kneaded it thoroughly with her hands, just as if she were making dough. She was always careful to mix the sand and the clay in the right proportions; for clay without sand, or with too little, was apt to crack when it came to be baked, and with too much it was not stiff enough to mould well into shape. She always saved the bits of any pots that were broken, and having pounded them up until they were quite small, she mixed them up with the new stuff. By long practice Gofa knew just how to prepare the clay for use.

Having got the clay ready, Gofa took a lump of it in her hands and laid it on a stone slab which served her as a working bench. Then, with her fingers and a smooth stone, and a stick shaped into a kind of blade, she worked up the clay into a little bowl, building up the sides against the stick, and smoothing the inside with her pebble. But for the larger jars and pipkins she had another way. She took a round basket shaped like a basin and set it before her. Then she took a piece of clay and rolled it with the flat of her hand on the bench until she had made it like a very long, thin, clay sausage. Then she picked this up and began to coil it round from the bottom of the basket, inside, pinching and pressing it with her fingers and the pebble until it was flat and smooth. Then she rolled out another piece and coiled this round as before, gradually building up the sides of the pot and pinching the coils together as she went on. At length, by adding coil to coil, she raised the sides and neck of the pipkin, which she then smoothed and finished off outside with the wooden tool.

All this time Gofa kept turning the pot she was making round and round upon the stone.

“Why do you keep on turning it round and round, mother?” Tig asked.

“So that I can see what I am doing,” said his mother. “The pot would be very ugly if one side bulged out more than the other, wouldn’t it? I turn it round and round so that I can keep it even and right.”

“Who taught you how to make pots, mother?” Tig asked.

“My mother taught me. She was a famous potter. People used to come to watch her when she was at work, but they could not make pots like hers; she had a rare hand in turning. I cannot turn them as she could.”

“I think you turn yours beautifully, mother,” said Tig.

All the pots alike, before they were baked, had to be decorated. This Gofa did with a bone awl, engraving a pattern of lines and cross-lines and dots upon the soft clay. She had also a little stamp of bone with which the dots could be put on in threes.

When Gofa had finished a batch of pots, she and Tig carried them into the hut to dry, and generally on the next day she found that even the larger ones had dried enough in the air to enable her to lift them out of their basket foundations. Then she took each one in turn and scraped and rubbed it outside with a wooden tool, very carefully and lightly.

After this she took them to where she had a fire burning out-of-doors upon the ground. She raked away the fire to one side, and set the pots where the fire had been, standing them all upside down, and ranging them together in as small a space as possible. Then she piled up sticks and pieces of dried fir tree wood about the pots, and laid little faggots all round, and raked up the hot ashes and set fire to the pile. And she and Tig carried fresh fuel as the fire burned, and kept it going until they could see the pots all red hot. And then they let it sink gradually and die down of itself; and there were the pots baked hard and sound, and fit for use as soon as they were cold.

Once Gofa had set to work making pottery, she used to make a good batch at a time; she did not stop making and baking as soon as she had finished just what she wanted at the time. For she liked to have a store of pottery at hand; and if she did not want to use them all herself, she could always exchange one or two for something useful that she might happen to want.

When Gofa or any of the other women wanted to make a large pankin for holding water or milk or meal, she used to make a tall basket, like a bucket, of osiers and reeds, and daub it inside with clay. The clay was laid on thickly and then smoothed and trimmed with the stone and the wooden blade; and the wide neck and the rim were moulded by hand. She did not attempt to lift the pankin out of the basket mould, but set the whole thing in the fire as it was; and the fire burned off the basket work, and left the marks of the reeds showing all round on the outside like a pattern. And very likely it was the look of this pattern on the pottery which first gave the women the notion of graving a design upon the smaller vessels which they made entirely by hand. The women generally took pains to make neat patterns by using different simple tools of wood and bone, and sometimes they tied a piece of twisted cord round a vessel, and impressed its mark upon the clay. Sometimes they did not use a tool at all, nor even a twisted cord, but made little dents round the neck of a jar with the thumb nail, and made the pattern in that way.