They Are Said To Be Afraid Of Fire-Mountains And Geyser Basins As Being The Dwelling Places Of
Dangerously Powerful And Unmanageable Gods.
However, it is food and
their relations to other tribes that mainly control the movements of
Indians; and here their food was mostly on the lower slopes, with
nothing except the wild sheep to tempt them higher.
Even these were
brought within reach without excessive climbing during the storms of
winter.
On the north side of Shasta, near Sheep Rock, there is a long cavern,
sloping to the northward, nearly a mile in length, thirty or forty
feet wide, and fifty feet or more in height, regular in form and
direction like a railroad tunnel, and probably formed by the flowing
away of a current of lava after the hardening of the surface. At the
mouth of this cave, where the light and shelter is good, I found many
of the heads and horns of the wild sheep, and the remains of
campfires, no doubt those of Indian hunters who in stormy weather had
camped there and feasted after the fatigues of the chase. A wild
picture that must have formed on a dark night - the glow of the fire,
the circle of crouching savages around it seen through the smoke, the
dead game, and the weird darkness and half-darkness of the walls of
the cavern, a picture of cave-dwellers at home in the stone age!
Interest in hunting is almost universal, so deeply is it rooted as an
inherited instinct ever ready to rise and make itself know.
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