“Poof!” he said, “I am tired! Up hill and down dale all day long and never a sight of game. As for the deer, there is no getting near them, and what we shall do if this goes on I cannot tell. But the wolves! why, they be as bold now as ever they were in the cold-time. There were five at least prowling about a bowshot from the gate.”
“Nay, I was not alone,” said Garff. “Darach was with me and he let fly at one and shot it through the body--a rare long shot--and the rest, as their way is, fell upon it and pulled it down and tore it to pieces. We went round to see that the cattle be all safe within walls. I never knew the wolves so fierce save when there was snow on the ground. But the cattle be safe; that’s one good thing; the cattle be safe. Give me some of that porridge, I am hungry.”
So Gofa brought him some porridge and a bowl of milk, and he sat by the fire and ate his supper, and afterwards ate some parched corn, munching a few grains at a time, while Gofa set to work to strip the fur from the squirrel and the water-rats to make them ready for cooking the next day.
By this time Tig and the other children had gone to lie down to sleep in the part of the hut where they slept. Then Gofa told Garff about Tosgy and how he came to ask for meal.
“I fear there will be many hungry mouths among our folk,” said Garff, “before the fruits are ripe and the harvest fit to be gathered in; and with game getting so hard to kill too! I am glad thou couldst spare some meal.”
“But I shall give him back his fox-skin,” said Gofa, “for they are very poor. See now, I will tell his wife to send one of the children for it next time she is making a coat!”
_The Harvest of the Fields and of the Woods_
ALTHOUGH the people had learned how to grow corn, they could not raise large crops. They tilled the ground only in patches, and they had no ploughs or harrows, nor had they any horses to work the land with. All the work was done by hand, and mostly by the women, although sometimes the old men and the boys helped them. They cleared the ground beyond the edge of the forest, and turned up the soil with their hoes.
When a woman wanted to make a hoe, she chose a bough of a tree that had a bend in it. Then she cut and trimmed this to the shape of the letter L, and, last of all, bound a flint, which had been chipped to a broad point, to the shorter limb of the bough with strips of hide; and so she had a useful tool for tilling her plot of ground.