Indians have the reputation of being always of a serious turn of mind.
My experience is to the contrary. They talk incessantly, laugh at any joke and love to play tricks on each other.
One night on Isle a la Crosse Lake, we had pitched camp near the tepee of a Chippewayan family. The weather was beautiful, the mosquitoes were gone—there was not a cloud in the sky.
The father, an old Indian with long, grey hair, decided to sleep in the open. He rolled himself up in his blanket in the bottom of his canoe and was soon asleep—snoring peacefully under a full moon, millions of stars and the shimmer of the northern lights low down on the horizon.
As soon as my two Indians saw that, they crept to the lake, filled a large kettle full of water, returned noiselessly and poured the contents of the kettle very gently in the canoe. Three times they did that without waking the sleeper. Then they hid in the bush and waited.