st.

On the day following the hunt, the women undertook the arduous work
of curing the skins of the slain animals. In the initial stage of the
process they used stone scrapers, sharp of edge and probably set in
bone handles. Hundreds of these implements have been found. The women
acquired great dexterity in this, one of their customary employments;
and while the men lounged about, resting from the fatigue of the
hunt, or occupied themselves with painting their bodies with ochre, or
tracing, with a splinter of stone, rude devices on pieces of polished
reindeer antler, the work of the women went industriously on.

Men of such undisciplined natures as those of the people of the
river-drift could not exist together harmoniously; very little,
indeed, was necessary to embroil them in bitter strife. Their women
were a frequent cause of bloody encounters, a circumstance which was
due to the fact that there was no permanence in the relations of the
sexes; such rights--seldom individual--to the women as were vested
in the men were always those acquired by brute force, and held good
only so long as the fancy or strength of the men permitted. In such
a promiscuous society there was nothing to suggest the home of
civilization. To men, women simply represented their chief possession
and were held by them in common, like other forms of property.

Such an age was almost as barren of material utilities as of moral
conceptions; so that one looks in vain for evidence of the knowledge
of such arts as are commonly associated with the life of women in
savage societies. Basket work, weaving, and spinning were occupations
of which, it is thought, the women of those times knew nothing.
Pottery was unknown; gourds served for drinking cups and for the
holding of liquids, and were used also for cooking. Among the
memorials of woman of these remote times appears no trace of the
charms and fetiches which usually accompany the performance of
domestic duties among primitive races. Nothing lower in the scale of
human existence could be imagined than the lives of these women of
the river-drift, to whom nature made no appeal save that of fear of
its furious moods, to whom sex meant not the possibilities of pure
wifehood and motherhood, but servitude to the demands of passion.
When children were not vigorous, or when for any reason their nurture
became irksome, they were ruthlessly slain, even by the mothers
themselves; and every woman knew that the lo