How Tig saw the Lake People’s Village

ON the next day, Gaithel took Tig and showed him the village; and Tig saw what he had taken to be an island was really a large and solid platform made of tree-trunks laid close together. There was a paling of stakes at the edge of the platform next the water, all round; and within the paling were the huts, built close together side by side in rows with narrow alleys in between, and sheds for the cattle, built of poles and wattled and daubed with clay like the huts. Besides their cattle the Lake People had some sheep, which they prized greatly on account of the wool, from which the women span yarn for weaving into cloth. At the place where the gangway joined the platform there was a gate of bars in the paling, and also a rough stairway going down to the canoes that were drawn up alongside. In an open place in the middle of the village was a fire burning on a large open hearthstone; and Gaithel said that nowhere else on the island was anyone allowed to have a fire, for fear of burning down the huts. In another place was a shoot for rubbish, to which the people had to bring their household refuse and tip it into the lake. Then Gaithel took Tig down to the landing stage, and showed him the canoes that were moored there; “I know someone who would like to see these canoes of yours,” said Tig. “He is a man in our village, called Crubach. He is lame. He makes troughs in the same way as you make canoes, by burning out a tree trunk, only of course they are much smaller; my mother has one to dip hides in when she is curing them.”

“My uncle is making a canoe in the wood now,” said Gaithel. “He has been at work on it for weeks and weeks. Shall we go and see him at it?”

So they went together into the wood where Gaithel’s uncle was at work. He had felled a stout oak tree and had got a portion of the trunk cut off. This was to be his canoe, and he had already begun to shape it fore and aft and to hollow it out. He had a little fire of dry chips and sticks burning in one place on the top of the log; and in another place, where he had had the fire burning the day before, he was hacking away at the charred wood with his stone axe. There was another man at work with him, and this man was hacking at the bows of the canoe; but his axe would not make a deep cut in the hard oak wood, and he was getting on very slowly.

Gaithel’s uncle left off work to speak to Tig. He stood up and wiped his face which was all hot and grimy.

“My boat will be a beauty when she is finished;” he said, “a rare one! Have you any like her in your village?”

“We haven’t any boats in our village,” said Tig.

“What—no boats? How do you do to get on the water then?”

“We haven’t any water,” said Tig, “at least not a lake—only a pond.”

“Well, yours must be a strange village! No lake and no boats! However, your men must be spared some heavy work if they don’t make dug-outs; though, look you, a man may make five or six bark canoes or wicker canoes in less time than it takes him to make one dug-out. But then a log canoe will outlast you four of the other, let alone being a deal more comfortable. So never mind the labour and the sweat, say I; make a good dug-out.”

Then he took up his axe and went to work again.

Then Gaithel took Tig back to the lake, and they got into a canoe and rowed on the lake. In the canoe was a spear with a long, fine-pointed head made of bone, barbed on both sides. This, Gaithel said, was a fish-spear; and he showed Tig how it was used in spearing large fish when the Lake People used their drag-net. The nets were kept at home, so that the women might see that they were kept properly mended.

“But when we are fishing,” said Gaithel, “we have the net weighted at the bottom with stones to sink it, and the one end is held up in one canoe and the other in another, and the canoes paddle in ashore, dragging the net between them. Then some of us wade out into the water, and spear the fish or catch them with our hands if we can, and then the net is drawn in closer until we get the rest, but sometimes some of them get away.”

Then Gaithel took Tig back to the hut, and he stayed to talk to Dobran, and told him that he thought the village a very wonderful place; and he asked Dobran why it was that the fathers of the Lake People built their village on the water.

“Why,” said Dobran, “they built it thus that they might be safe from the attacks of wild beasts and from their enemies. As I told thee, they made the platform first, felling trees in the woods and piling them here, before ever they could set one pole of a hut. And with great labour they did this, building as large as they could; but even so, the space is too small.

“We are sorely crowded, as I said before; and now some of the younger men choose rather to build huts on the shore, hard by, where we have our cornland and the pasture for the cattle; though we who are older like the old ways best. Of course the wolves and such like are not so much to be feared as they were in our fathers’ days; and as for enemies—why, we have lived in peace many years and perhaps we have naught to fear. Nevertheless, I promise thee, if enemies should come to fight us, the folk who have built their houses and their byres and their sheepfolds away on the land there, with naught but a stockade around them, would speedily flee for shelter to our stronghold here on the water.”

Dobran’s wife, who was sitting beside her husband, was busily spinning yarn; and when Dobran had finished speaking, she began to hum a song as she drew the thread. She had a big bunch of wool fastened to the end of a stick beside her, and she drew out some hair from the wool and twisted it into a thread between her thumb and finger. Then she tied the end of this to the spindle, which was a pointed stick loaded about the middle with a ball of dried clay, and started twirling it round with her other hand. As the spindle went spinning round in the air, and dropping towards the ground, it drew the thread out longer, twisting it all the time. As soon as the spindle reached the ground, Dobran’s wife picked it up, wound the thread round it and set it spinning again; and so she went on until she had spun a good ball of yarn.

Outside the hut a daughter of Dobran’s, whose name was Eira, was sitting at the loom weaving cloth. Her loom was an upright wooden frame, and the main threads, called the warp, were stretched from the top of the loom to the bottom and kept taut by means of stone weights. In her hand Eira held a shuttle containing the cross-thread, called the woof, which she passed in and out through the warp, from side to side of the loom. After she had worked in five or six cross-lines in this way, and so had got a narrow piece of cloth woven, she stopped and picked up a thin, flat piece of wood, cut into teeth like a comb, and combed the web and pressed it down firmly. Her thread was finer and her cloth better than the women made in Tig’s village, and he stood and watched her. “Aye,” said Dobran, “she is a famous weaver. She shall give thee a girdle of her own weaving. Nay, now, she shall weave thee a shirt of three colours, and thou shalt come again and fetch it for thyself.”

On the next morning Tig rose early, and found that Dobran’s people were already astir. Eira and another girl were grinding corn on a big, flat rubbing stone; and afterwards Eira took the meal that they had ground to make cakes for breakfast.

Then, after they had eaten the morning meal, Tig bade farewell to his friends, the Lake People, and set off homeward. Some of the men paddled him ashore in a canoe, and guided him through the woods and set him on the way; and he returned to his father’s camp.