But it must not be supposed that Tom’s childhood and youth were spent entirely in work and in the acquirement of social and ceremonial knowledge. On the contrary, what interested him at least as much as sociology was play. He spun his tops—rather clumsy looking, two-pegged tops they were—threw his gaming spears in the spear and grass game and in the hoop-rolling game, hit feathered billets with a flat bat, threw beaver teeth dice (though this was chiefly a woman’s game), and, when he grew older, took part in the favorite game of “lehal,” the almost universal Western American guessing game, played with two or four gambling bones to the accompaniment of stirring songs. More properly belonging to the domain of sport was the somewhat dangerous game of canoe-upsetting, in which the contestants upset their canoes and quickly righted them at a hand-clap signal. This was an especially favored game of Tom’s. All through his life, up to the time that he lost his sight, he was as instinctively familiar with the run of water, the dip and lurch of a canoe, and the turn of a paddle, as with the movements of walking on the land. Indeed, for days on end, at certain seasons, his life flowed on insistently to the very rhythm of rising and falling wave.