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Show a commanding position near the pot-bellied stove at the rear. They ignored me. Once in a while a redman would hold up an article and ask my parents, "How much?" When Father or Mother replied they made the invariable answer, You cheat!" Gruffly yet not in an argumentative or bartering tone but evidently out of a habit of regarding whites as habitual exploiters of redmen. Although we all watched uneasily we detected no thievery. The objects handled were returned to their places after scrutiny. Then the squaws laid out beautiful gloves and gauntlets of doeskin, tanned as soft as chamois, beaded artistically. Father bought Mother a pair of gloves. I wanted to ask if the squaws tanned the skins in a way I'd read that the Plains Indians did, by spreading them with a mixture of animal brains and other ingredients and giving the final touch by chewing-actually chewing- the hide to make it soft to wear. But I was too shy, too afraid of hurting their feelings by saying some slighting thing. We also bought bags of pinenuts from them. These were the big soft-shelled type from pinyon trees in the Needles and Wah Wahs. They were not those little hard-shelled nuts from New Mexico pines, the sort that you bit through and left half a nut in each part of the shell until you became disgusted and threw both halves away. The pinyon trees were lower, bushier, even gnarled and twisted, but they yielded large juicy nuts that you could crack easily with your fingers or teeth, and each was almost a tender mouthful, with just enough flavor of the pinyon wood fire in which they'd been cracked out of the cones and roasted. The best nuts in the world, we decided! The bucks wanted two items especially: vanilla and lemon extract with a high percentage of alcohol in them, and the Jamaica Ginger bottles Father had in his little stock of medicines. But Father, sternly aware of the regulation against selling "firewater" to Indians, sold only one bottle of the vanilla and none of the Jamaica Ginger to the crowd. They demanded. Father held firm. |
