Note 21 — Chapter IX · TOOLS

“The first that rakes are mentioned in the stories of my tribe so far as I know, is in the tale of ‘The Grandson.’ There is a little lake down near Short River where lived an old magic woman, whom we call Old-woman-who-never-dies. There is a level piece of ground near by, about five miles long by one and a half mile wide. This flat land was the garden of Old-woman-who-never-dies. Her servants were the deer that thronged the near-by timber. These deer worked her garden for her. All buck deer have horns; and with their horns the deer raked up the weeds and refuse of Old-woman-who-never-dies’s garden.

“Now deer shed their horns. Old-woman-who-never-dies got these shed horns and bound them on sticks and so we got our first rakes. Her grandson saw what she did and afterwards taught the people to make rakes also.

“In later times we learned to make rakes of ash wood instead of horns; but we still reckon the teeth to mean the tines of a deer’s antler. Sometimes deer have six, sometimes seven tines on an antler. So we make our ash rakes, some with six, some with seven teeth.

“If the Grandson had not seen what his grandmother did, we Hidatsas would never have known how to make rakes, either of horn or of ash wood.”—Wolf Chief (told in 1910).