And now the hunters, two or three at a time, began to come rapidly in, and each, consigning his horses to the squaws, entered his lodge with the air of a man whose day’s work was done.  The squaws flung down the load from the burdened horses, and vast piles of meat and hides were soon accumulated before every lodge.  By this time it was darkening fast, and the whole village was illumined by the glare of fires blazing all around.  All the squaws and children were gathered about the piles of meat, exploring them in search of the daintiest portions.  Some of these they roasted on sticks before the fires, but often they dispensed with this superfluous operation.  Late into the night the fires were still glowing upon the groups of feasters engaged in this savage banquet around them.

Several hunters sat down by the fire in Kongra-Tonga’s lodge to talk over the day’s exploits.  Among the rest, Mene-Seela came in.  Though he must have seen full eighty winters, he had taken an active share in the day’s sport.  He boasted that he had killed two cows that morning, and would have killed a third if the dust had not blinded him so that he had to drop his bow and arrows and press both hands against his eyes to stop the pain.  The firelight fell upon his wrinkled face and shriveled figure as he sat telling his story with such inimitable gesticulation that every man in the lodge broke into a laugh.

Old Mene-Seela was one of the few Indians in the village with whom I would have trusted myself alone without suspicion, and the only one from whom I would have received a gift or a service without the certainty that it proceeded from an interested motive.  He was a great friend to the whites.  He liked to be in their society, and was very vain of the favors he had received from them.  He told me one afternoon, as we were sitting together in his son’s lodge, that he considered the beaver and the whites the wisest people on earth; indeed, he was convinced they were the same; and an incident which had happened to him long before had assured him of this.  So he began the following story, and as the pipe passed in turn to him, Reynal availed himself of these interruptions to translate what had preceded.  But the old man accompanied his words with such admirable pantomime that translation was hardly necessary.

He said that when he was very young, and had never yet seen a white man, he and three or four of his companions were out on a beaver hunt, and he crawled into a large beaver lodge, to examine what was there.  Sometimes he was creeping on his hands and knees, sometimes he was obliged to swim, and sometimes to lie flat on his face and drag himself along.  In this way he crawled a great distance underground.  It was very dark, cold and close, so that at last he was almost suffocated, and fell into a swoon.  When he began to recover, he could just distinguish the voices of his companions outside, who had given him up for lost, and were singing his death song.