If there was a warm autumn sun, I often carried the hide with the cleansed seeds upon it, and laid it on the floor of the drying stage outside for the seeds to dry; but if the day was chill or winter had set in, I dried the seeds by the fire.
When quite dried, the seeds were put in a skin sack to be stored in a cache pit. The storing bag was often the whole skin of a buffalo calf, with only the neck left open for a mouth; or it might be made of a small fawn skin; or it might be made of a piece of old tent cover and shaped like a cylinder.
Sometimes we boiled ripe squashes whole, seeds and all; and we then ate the seeds. They tasted something like peanuts.
These seeds of boiled squashes were eaten just as they came from the squash. I would take up two or three seeds in my mouth, crushing them with my teeth; and with my tongue I would separate the kernels from the shells which I spat out. I was rather fond of squash seeds.
I have also heard of families who prepared squash seeds by parching or roasting; but I never did this myself.
I have heard that in old days my tribe used to roast fall-kept ripe squashes. They were buried in the ashes and roasted whole. I never did this myself, however.
There is a story that an old man who was blind, was handed a squash thus roasted. He found the squash to his liking, but did not know how it had been cooked.
“Girl,” he cried, “let me have the broth this was boiled in!”
“The squash was roasted in the ashes; it has no broth,” answered the girl who had handed it to him.
The blind man laughed. “I thought it was boiled in a pot,” he said.
I judge from this story that several squashes had been roasted, and that the blind man got one as his share.
It was our custom to remove to our winter village in the mida´-pạx´di widi´c, or leaf-turn-yellow moon; it corresponds about to October. I remember the leaves used to be falling from the trees while we were working about our winter lodges, getting ready for cold weather.
When moving time came in the fall, any squashes left over in the lodge, uneaten, were stored in a cache pit until spring. But it was a difficult thing to store these squashes so that they would keep sound; and when spring came many of them would be found to have rotted. Some families were more careful in making ready and storing their cache pits than were others. Squashes kept best when stored in carefully prepared pits.