“Well, yours must be a strange village! No lake and no boats! However, your men must be spared some heavy work if they don’t make dug-outs; though, look you, a man may make five or six bark canoes or wicker canoes in less time than it takes him to make one dug-out. But then a log canoe will outlast you four of the other, let alone being a deal more comfortable. So never mind the labour and the sweat, say I; make a good dug-out.” Then he took up his axe and went to work again. Then Gaithel took Tig back to the lake, and they got into a canoe and rowed on the lake. In the canoe was a spear with a long, fine-pointed head made of bone, barbed on both sides. This, Gaithel said, was a fish-spear; and he showed Tig how it was used in spearing large fish when the Lake People used their drag-net. The nets were kept at home, so that the women might see that they were kept properly mended. “But when we are fishing,” said Gaithel, “we have the net weighted at the bottom with stones to sink it, and the one end is held up in one canoe and the other in another, and the canoes paddle in ashore, dragging the net between them. Then some of us wade out into the water, and spear the fish or catch them with our hands if we can, and then the net is drawn in closer until we get the rest, but sometimes some of them get away.” Then Gaithel took Tig back to the hut, and he stayed to talk to Dobran, and told him that he thought the village a very wonderful place; and he asked Dobran why it was that the fathers of the Lake People built their village on the water. “Why,” said Dobran, “they built it thus that they might be safe from the attacks of wild beasts and from their enemies. As I told thee, they made the platform first, felling trees in the woods and piling them here, before ever they could set one pole of a hut. And with great labour they did this, building as large as they could; but even so, the space is too small. “We are sorely crowded, as I said before; and now some of the younger men choose rather to build huts on the shore, hard by, where we have our cornland and the pasture for the cattle; though we who are older like the old ways best. Of course the wolves and such like are not so much to be feared as they were in our fathers’ days; and as for enemies--why, we have lived in peace many years and perhaps we have naught to fear. Nevertheless, I promise thee, if enemies should come to fight us, the folk who have built their houses and their byres and their sheepfolds away on the land there, with naught but a stockade around them, would speedily flee for shelter to our stronghold here on the water.”