[Illustration:  Yan’s toilet]

Odd things that he found in the woods he would bring to his shanty:  curled sticks, feathers, bones, skulls, fungus, shells, an old cowhorn—­things that interested him, he did not know why.  He made Indian necklaces of the shells, strung together alternately with the backbone of a fish.  He let his hair grow as long as possible, employing various stratagems, even the unpalatable one of combing it to avoid the monthly trim of the maternal scissors.  He lay for hours with the sun beating on his face to correct his colour to standard, and the only semblance of personal vanity that he ever had was pleasure in hearing disparaging remarks about the darkness of his complexion.  He tried to do everything as an Indian would do it, striking Indian poses, walking carefully with his toes turned in, breaking off twigs to mark a place, guessing at the time by the sun, and grunting “Ugh” or “Wagh” when anything surprised him.  Disparaging remarks about White-men, delivered in supposed Indian dialect, were an important part of his pastime.  “Ugh, White-men heap no good” and “Wagh, paleface—­pale fool in woods,” were among his favourites.

He was much influenced by phrases that caught his ear.  “The brown sinewy arm of the Indian,” was one of them.  It discovered to him that his own arms were white as milk.  There was, however, a simple remedy.  He rolled up his sleeves to the shoulder and exposed them to the full glare of the sun.  Then later, under the spell of the familiar phrase, “The warrior was naked to the waist,” he went a step further—­he determined to be brown to the waist—­so discarded his shirt during the whole of one holiday.  He always went to extremes.  He remembered now that certain Indians put their young warriors through an initiation called the Sun-dance, so he danced naked round the fire in the blazing sun and sat around naked all one day.

He noticed a general warmness before evening, but it was at night that he really felt the punishment of his indiscretion.  He was in a burning heat.  He scarcely slept all night.  Next day he was worse, and his arm and shoulder were blistered.  He bore it bravely, fearing only that the Home Government might find it out, in which case he would have fared worse.  He had read that the Indians grease the skin for sunburn, so he went to the bathroom and there used goose grease for lack of Buffalo fat.  This did give some relief, and in a few days he was better and had the satisfaction of peeling the dead skin from his shoulders and arms.

Yan made a number of vessels out of Birch bark, stitching the edges with root fibers, filling the bottom with a round wooden disc, and cementing the joints with pine gum so that they would hold water.

In the distant river he caught some Catfish and brought them home—­that, is, to his shanty.  There he made a fire and broiled them—­very badly—­but he ate them as a great delicacy.  The sharp bone in each of their side fins he saved, bored a hole through its thick end, smoothed it, and so had needles to stitch his Birch bark.  He kept them in a bark box with some lumps of resin, along with some bark fiber, an Indian flint arrow-head given him by a schoolmate, and the claws of a large Owl, found in the garbage heap back of the taxidermist’s shop.