Indiana could not understand why Hector
did not follow the custom of her Indian fathers, and offer the first duck
or the best fish to propitiate the Great Spirit. Hector told her that the
God he worshipped desired no sacrifice; that his holy Son, when he came
down from heaven and gave himself as a sacrifice for the sins of the world,
had satisfied his Father, the Great Spirit, an hundred-fold.
They feasted now continually upon the waterfowl, and Catharine learned from
Indiana how to skin them, and so preserve the feathers for making tippets,
and bonnets, and ornamental trimmings, which are not only warm, but light
and very becoming. They split open any of the birds that they did not
require for present consumption, and these they dried for winter store,
smoking some after the manner that the Shetlanders and Orkney people smoke
the solan geese: their shanty displayed an abundant store of provisions,
fish, flesh, and fowl, besides baskets of wild rice, and bags of dried
fruit.
One day Indiana came in from the brow of the hill, and told the boys that
the lake eastward was covered with canoes; she showed, by holding up her
two hands and then three fingers, that she had counted thirteen.
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