a dense cloud of smoke still in the upper part, but below it clear air.  They would then brush off the Mosquitoes that had alighted on their clothes, crawl into the lodge and close the door tight.  Not a Mosquito was left alive in it, and the smoke hanging about the smoke-vent was enough to keep them from coming in, and so they slept in peace.  Thus they could baffle the worst pest of the woods.  But there was yet another destroyer of comfort by day, and this was the Blue-bottle flies.  There seemed more of them as time went on, and they laid masses of yellowish eggs on anything that smelled like meat or corruption.  They buzzed about the table and got into the dishes; their dead, drowned and mangled bodies were polluting all the food, till Caleb remarked during one of his ever-increasing visits:  “It’s your own fault.  Look at all the filth ye leave scattered about.”

There was no blinking the fact; for fifty feet around the teepee the ground was strewn with scraps of paper, tins and food.  To one side was a mass of potato peelings, bones, fish-scales and filth, and everywhere were the buzzing flies, to be plagues all day, till at sundown the Mosquitoes relieved them and took the night shift of the office of torment.

“I want to learn, especially if it’s Injun,” said Little Beaver.  “What had we best do?”

“Wall, first ye could move camp; second, ye could clean this.”

As there was no other available camp ground they had no choice, and Yan said with energy:  “Boys, we got to clean this and keep it clean, too.  We’ll dig a hole for everything that won’t burn.”

So Yan seized the spade and began to dig in the bushes not far from the teepee.  Sam and Guy were gradually drawn in.  They began gathering all the rubbish and threw it into the hole.  As they tumbled in bones, tins and scraps of bread Yan said:  “I just hate to see that bread go in.  It doesn’t seem right when there’s so many living things would be glad to get it.”

At this, Caleb, who was sitting on a log placidly smoking, said: 

“Now, if ye want to be real Injun, ye gather all the eatables ye don’t want—­meat, bread and anything, an’ every day put it on some high place.  Most generally the Injuns has a rock—­they call it Wakan; that means sacred medicine—­an’ there they leave scraps of food to please the good spirits.  Av coorse it’s the birds and Squirrels gets it all; but the Injun is content as long as it’s gone, an’ if ye argy with them that ’tain’t the spirits gets it, but the birds, they say:  ’That doesn’t matter.  The birds couldn’t get it if the spirits didn’t want them to have it,’ or maybe the birds took it to carry to the spirits!”

Then the Grand Council went out in a body to seek the Wakan Rock.  They found a good one in the open part of the woods, and it became a daily duty of one to carry the remnants of food to the rock.  They were probably less acceptable to the wood creatures than they would have been half a year later, but they soon found that there were many birds glad to eat at the Wakan; and moreover, that before long there was a trail from the brook, only twenty-five yards away, that told of four-foots also enjoying the bounty of the good spirits.