In summer-time they used to find the dug-out hut too hot to live in,
and besides, they had to take their cattle out to fresh pastures. So
they, and their friends who lived in the other huts close by, used to
pack up their skin rugs and all their other belongings, and travel to
another part of the hill country. Some of the men used to march on in
front, with their spears and bows and arrows ready, in case they were
to meet any wild beasts. Then came the rest of the men and the boys
with the dogs, driving the cattle along; and after them the old men
and the women and children, with more armed men to bring up the rear.
The women carried the skins and the cooking pots and the food; and
almost every one had a baby bound on to her back. The food was carried
in baskets, and the bigger children helped to carry the baskets.
The smaller children had no loads to carry, except their dolls and
playthings which they hugged in their arms as they walked along beside
their mothers.
The people left the huts and marched down the hill. Then they crossed
the river, wading into the water at a shallow place. But the little
children had to be carried over; and Tig was carried over by his mother
every time until after he was seven.
The tribe used to take a whole day in travelling to the camping-place;
and when they got there at last, they used to make a new fire, and
light bonfires in the open, and cook their supper, and sleep in tents
and booths about the fires.
Up on the hill-side, at the edge of the forest, where the ground had
been partly cleared, was the place of the first summer camp. The summer
huts were built above ground, of branches of trees, wattled with
withies and twigs, and daubed with clay. Sometimes a man had only to
repair the hut that he had lived in the summer before. But even if he
had to build a new one, it was not such hard work as to build a winter
hut. Before a man began to build his summer hut, he picked out a tree
with a straight trunk to act as the main support of his hut. He used
the tree as a centre pillar to hold up his roof-beams. If he built his
summer hut in the open, away from the trees, he set up a pole for a
roof-tree. We still talk of living under our own roof-tree, just as
those people did long ago.
The fireplaces were made out-of-doors. If they had been indoors, the
huts would often have been burned down. Probably they often were burned
down even then. So whatever cooking Tig’s mother wanted to do in the
summer camps she did at a big fire outside the huts.
The winter village of dug-out huts was high up on the hillside at the
upper end of a sheltered valley, and the summer camps were set up at
different places upon the hills, as the people moved about with their
cattle; and wherever they were, they always put up a stockade of posts
around the huts, to keep themselves and their cattle safe from wolves
and bears.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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