[Illustration:  Fig. 22.  Chair Seat Snow Shoe.]

Barrel Stave Snow Shoe.

Another pair of shoes was made from barrel staves.  At first one stave was made to serve for a shoe, but we found that two staves fastened together with a pair of wooden cleats were much better.  Jack was the proud inventor of these shoes and insisted that they were far more satisfactory than the elaborate ones which were later devised.

[Illustration:  Fig. 23.  Barrel Stave Snow Shoe.]

Barrel Hoop Snow Shoe.

[Illustration:  Fig. 24.  Barrel Hoop Snow Shoe.]

Now that Jack had shown his ingenuity, Fred thought it was his turn to do something, and after mysteriously disappearing for the space of an hour we saw him suddenly come waddling back to the shed on a pair of barrel hoops covered with heavy canvas.  He had stretched the canvas so tightly across the hoops that they were bent to an oval shape.  It was claimed for these shoes, and with good reason, that they were not so slippery as the barrel stave shoe, for they permitted the foot to sink slightly into the snow.

After dinner, Dutchy came back with a book of his father’s, a sort of an encyclopedia in which several different kinds of snow shoes were illustrated.  Reddy, whose father owned a sawmill, volunteered to provide us with strips of hickory from which to make the frames.

The Sioux Snow Shoe.

[Illustration:  Fig.25.  Sioux Shoe.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 26.  Frame of the Sioux Shoe.]

The Sioux snow shoe was the first type we tackled.  Two strips of hickory 4 feet long and 3/4 inch square in section, were bent over a pair of spreaders and securely fastened together at each end.  The spreaders were about 12 inches long and located about 15 inches apart.  They were notched at the ends, as shown in Fig. 26, to receive the side strips, which were not fastened together until after they had been nailed to the spreaders.  We found that the most satisfactory way of fastening together the ends of the hickory strips was to bolt them together.  When the frame was completed, we began the tedious process of weaving in the filling or web of the snow shoe.  First we cut notches in the edges of the spreaders, spacing these notches an inch apart.  Then we procured several balls of heavy twine at the corner store.  Tying one end of the cord to the right side stick about three inches below the forward spreader, we stretched a strand down to the notch at the left end of the lower spreader.  The strand was drawn taut, and after making several twists around it the cord was tied to the left side stick three inches above the spreader.  From this point the cord was stretched to the notch at the right end of the upper spreader, twisted several times and brought back to the starting point.  The cord was now wrapped around the side stick for a space of about an inch, and then carried down to the second notch on the lower spreader, whence