rface of the shallow water, and
were ripe for harvesting in September. At this period the Amerindians
passed in canoes through the water-fields of wild rice, shaking the
ears into the canoes as they swept by. The grain fell out easily when
ripe, but in order to clean it from the husk it was dried over a slow
fire on a wooden grating. After being winnowed it was pounded to flour
in a mortar, or else boiled like rice, and seasoned with fat. "It had
a most delicate taste", wrote Alexander Henry the Elder.

Fish was perhaps the staple of Amerindian diet, because in scarcely
any part of the Canadian Dominion is a lake, river, or brook far away.
In the region of the Great Lakes fish were caught in large quantities
in October, and exposed to the weather to be frozen at nighttime. They
were then stored away in this congealed state, and lasted good--more
or less--till the following April.

Pemmican--that early form of potted meat so familiar to the readers of
Red-Indian romances--was made of the lean meat of the bison. The
strips of meat were dried in the sun, and afterwards pounded in a
mortar and mixed with an equal quantity of bison fat. Fish "pemmican"
was sun-dried fish ground to powder.

A favourite dish among the northern Indians was blood mixed with the
half-digested food found in the stomach of a deer, boiled up with a
sufficient quantity of water to make it of the consistency of pease
porridge. Some scraps of fat or tender flesh were shredded small and
boiled with it. To render this dish more palatable they had a method
of mixing the blood with the contents of the stomach in the paunch
itself, and hanging it up in the heat and smoke of the fire for
several days--in other words, the Scotch haggis. The kidneys of both
moose and buffalo were usually eaten _raw_ by the southern Indians,
for no sooner was one of those beasts killed than the hunter ripped up
its belly, snatched out the kidneys, and ate them warm, before the
animal was quite dead. They also at times put their mouths to the
wound the ball or the arrow had made, and sucked the blood; this, they
said, quenched thirst, and was very nourishing.

The favourite drink of the Ojibwe Indians in the wintertime was hot
broth poured over a dishful of pure snow.

The Amerindians of the Nipigon country (north of Lake Superior) and
the Ojibwes and Kris often relapsed into cannibalism when hard up for
food. Indeed some of them became so addicted to this practice that
th