When at home the Tarahumare keeps regular hours, rising and retiring with the sun.  Having slept on a skin on the floor, rolled up in his blanket, without anything for a pillow except perhaps a stone or a chunk of wood, he sits for a while near the fire, which is kept up most of the year at night in the house or cave.  His wife brings him his breakfast of pinole.  While combing out his long black hair with a pine cone, he may ask the boys and girls whether they have attended to the traps he told them to set on the night before.  They run out and soon they come in with some mice.  “Here they are,” they say, “but they are very poor!” The father, however, may consider them fat and nice, and the mother affably adds:  “Of course, they are fat, since they have eaten so much corn.”  They go about to roast them, while the husband looks on.  Generally the Tarahumares have a number of traps set to catch mice.  They are so fond of this “game” that, when civilised, they have been known to ask permission from Mexican acquaintances to go through their houses to hunt for them.  The mice are skinned and threaded on a thin stick, which is stuck through their necks and serves as a spit.

Having enjoyed the dainty morsel thus set before him, the husband now tells his wife what he is going to do to-day.  He will run deer or hunt squirrels, and accordingly takes his bow and arrows or his axe with him.  In spring-time he may go to the field.  The wife also tells of her plans for the day.  The work that engages most of the time of the housewives in Mexico is the grinding of the corn, on the metate, for corn-cakes; and if she has any time to spare she boils beans, looks for herbs, or works on her weaving-frame; but she never sits about idle.  She looks as conscientiously after her duties as any white woman; she has always something to do, and many things to take care of in her small way.

About sunset the husband returns, bringing a squirrel or rabbit, which he carries concealed in his blanket, that no neighbour may see it and expect an invitation to help to eat it.  As he goes and comes he never salutes his wife or children.  He enters in silence and takes his seat near the fire.  The animal he caught he throws toward her where she is kneeling before the metate, so that it falls on her skirt.  She ejaculates “Sssssssssss!” in approval and admiration, and, picking it up, praises its good points extravagantly:  “What a big mouth!  What large claws!” etc.  He tells her how hard he worked to get that squirrel, how it had run up the tree, and he had to cut down that tree, till finally the dog caught it.  “The dog is beginning to be very good at hunting,” he says.  “And now I am very tired.”  She spreads before him a generous supper of beans, herbs, and maize porridge, which she has ready for him.  And while he eats she goes industriously to work removing the fur from the game, but leaving on the skin, not only because it keeps the meat together while it is boiling, but mainly because she thinks there is a good deal of nourishment in it, which it would be a shame to waste.