Tig’s Mother, and the Lessons that she taught him

TIG’S mother was called Gofa. She was the mistress of the house and the housekeeper. She did not keep any servants, but did the work herself; she minded Tig and his little brothers and sisters, and cooked their meals and made clothes for Garff and all the family. Their clothes were mostly made of skins, and Gofa always prepared the skins for the clothes with her own hands. To make a suit out of a deerskin was a long business. The hide had to be dried in the open air, and then scraped all over with flint scrapers until all the hair was taken off. Then it was smeared with the animal’s brains and fat, and allowed to dry again; and then thoroughly washed in wooden tubs and tanned with the bark of oak-trees. When at last it was cured and dried, it was cut into pieces and the pieces sewn together with sinews. Gofa’s needles were made of bone, and they were not very sharp: she used to pierce holes in the leather with a little bodkin made of flint stone before she could put in the stitches. But once the stitches were made, they held firmer than any that are sewn with thread.

Whenever a deer was brought home or a cow killed, Gofa always kept the big sinews from the legs and dried them in the sun or under the roof of the hut indoors.

Then she took a flint knife and scraped the sinew and shredded it into threads, and drew the threads separately through her fingers, and put them away in a pouch made of deer-skin. This was her store of thread.

The suit that most people wore was a sark; it was a sort of shirt which came down to the knees, and was girded with a belt at the waist. This was generally made of dressed hide; but almost every one had besides a thicker dress for cold weather, with the hair left on; and the richer people had these trimmed with different sorts of fur. Some wore cloaks besides, and caps made of skin with the hair on.

When the men went hunting they wore shoes made of hide, and leather bands wrapped round their legs for leggings. The people let their hair grow long; and they often used to spend much time combing and dressing it.

Most people, unless they were very poor, had also finer garments of cloth, which the women span and wove. But cloth was much scarcer than skins, besides being more easily worn out; and so the clothes for everyday wear were always of dressed hides. Men who spent a great part of their time hunting and creeping about in the thickets of the forest, wanted a suit which would turn the wet and not tear easily among the thorns and briars.

Tig had his first little sark and belt when he was seven years old—it was made of deer-skin; but he had neither cap nor leggings; for, like all the other children, he used to run about barefoot and bareheaded.

Gofa taught her children many things, but she did not teach them to read or to write: she could neither read nor write herself, nor could any of her neighbours.

People had no books and no writing in those times. Tig did not learn to do sums or to say the Multiplication Table; but he did learn to count, by saying the numbers on his fingers. However, as it is such a long time since he lived, and as no one ever wrote down exactly how people counted in those days, Tig’s names for the figures are not known for certain. But it is very likely that they were something like this. On the fingers of one hand, instead of One, Two, Three, Four, Five, he said what sounded like

and then on the fingers of the other hand,

for Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten; and that was as far as he got in the way of counting at first.

But there were many things that Tig learned from his mother out-of-doors; for Gofa used to do a great deal of work with the other women, preparing the ground for corn and reaping the crops at harvest time; and Tig used to go with his mother to the fields, or to the river when she went to cut osiers for making baskets, or into the woods to gather firewood. He learned to be always on the look-out; always to listen for every sound—even so little a noise as the snapping of a twig; and always to bear in mind what he was going to do in case of sudden danger, and where he should run to for safety if he had to flee from a wild beast. Tig did not know many things that most boys and girls know in these times; but he could do one thing that hardly any boy or girl can do nowadays—he could move his ears backward and forward just as he wished, when he was listening very carefully to any slight sound in the woods.

Tig liked the summer-time best. It was much better fun playing in the forest near the huts and lying basking in the hot sun than crawling about in the dark, smoky winter pit-hut. He used to climb about in the trees, even when he was quite little. While his mother was busy with her work out-of-doors, she used to put him up into a tree and let him play about among the branches by himself; and sometimes she even made a sort of little crib for him with bands of hide, and left him to sleep safe and sound in a big oak tree. This was to keep him out of danger from wild animals. For in those days it was dangerous for children to be out in the open or in the woods away from the huts, because there were often wolves or other savage beasts prowling about.

But round Tig’s home there was less danger, because the wild beasts had learned to fear men and their weapons and their fires. But still, wolves and bears were seen sometimes close to the village; so the children were safer playing up in the trees than on the ground; and they all learned to be very good climbers.

From the boys with whom he played, when he grew older, Tig learned many other useful things. He learned to swing himself down from one branch of a tree to a lower branch, and catch hold with his feet; to dive without splashing, and swim under water right across to the opposite bank of the river; to save his breath when running, so as to last out on a long race. He and the other boys practised shooting with bows and arrows, which their fathers helped them to make. And they had stone-throwing matches, too; and no one was considered to be any good unless he could throw hard and straight with both hands. Tig and his friends all longed to become hunters, and their favourite game was to play at hunting; and as they grew older, they used to go out in parties into the woods to hunt and fish. But they did not often bring home any game.