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THE TRAIL BOOK
BY
MARY AUSTIN
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY MILO WINTER
1918
[Illustration: "'Arr-rr-ump!' I said"]
TO MARY, MY NIECE
IN THE HOPE THAT SHE MAY FIND THROUGH THE TRAILS OF HER OWN COUNTRY THE
ROAD TO WONDERLAND CONTENTS
I HOW OLIVER AND DORCAS JANE FOUND THE TRAIL
II WHAT THE BUFFALO CHIEF TOLD
III HOW THE MASTODON HAPPENED FIRST TO BELONG TO A MAN, AS TOLD BY
ARRUMPA
IV THE SECOND PART OF THE MASTODON STORY, CONCERNING THE TRAIL TO THE
SEA AND THE TALKING STICK OF TAKU-WAKIN
V HOW HOWKAWANDA AND FRIEND-AT-THE-BACK FOUND THE TRAIL TO THE BUFFALO
COUNTRY; TOLD BY THE COYOTE
VI DORCAS JANE HEARS HOW THE CORN CAME TO THE VALLEY OF THE MISSI-SIPPU;
TOLD BY THE CORN WOMAN
VII A TELLING OF THE SALT TRAIL, OF TSE-TSE-YOTE AND THE DELIGHT-MAKERS;
TOLD BY MOKE-ICHA
VIII YOUNG-MAN-WHO-NEVER-TURNS-BACK: A TELLING OF THE TALLEGEWI, BY ONE
OF THEM
IX HOW THE LENNI-LENAPE CAME FROM SHINAKI AND THE TALLEGEWI FOUGHT THEM:
THE SECOND PART OF THE MOUND-BUILDER'S STORY
X THE MAKING OF A SHAMAN: A TELLING OF THE IROQUOIS TRAIL, BY THE
ONONDAGA
XI THE PEARLS OF COFACHIQUE: HOW LUCAS DE AYLLON CAME TO LOOK FOR THEM
AND WHAT THE CACICA FAR-LOOKING DID TO HIM; TOLD BY THE PELICAN.
XII HOW THE IRON SHIRTS CAME TO TUSCALOOSA: A TELLING OF THE TRIBUTE
ROAD BY THE LADY OF COFACHIQUE.
XIII HOW THE IRON SHIRTS CAME LOOKING FOR THE SEVEN CITIES OF CIBOLA;
TOLD BY THE ROAD-RUNNER.
XIV HOW THE MAN OF TWO HEARTS KEPT THE SECRET OF THE HOLY PLACES; TOLD
BY THE CONDOR.
XV HOW THE MEDICINE OF THE ARROWS WAS BROKEN AT REPUBLICAN RIVER; TOLD
BY THE CHIEF OFFICER OF THE DOG SOLDIERS
APPENDIX
GLOSSARY
ILLUSTRATIONS
"'ARR-RR-UMP!' I SAID"
THE BUFFALO CHIEF
THE MASTODON
TAKU AND ARRUMPA
THE TRAIL TO THE SEA
THE TRAIL TO THE BUFFALO COUNTRY
SHOT DOWNWARD TO THE LEDGE WHERE HOWKAWANDA AND YOUNGER BROTHER HUGGED
THEMSELVES (in color)
THE CORN WOMEN
SIGN OF THE SUN AND THE FOUR QUARTERS
MOKE-ICHA
TSE-TSE-YOTE AND MOKE-ICHA (in Color)
TSE-TSE-YOTE AND MOKE-ICHA
THE MOUND-BUILDERS
THE IROQUOIS TRAIL
THE GOLD-SEEKERS
SHE COULD SEE THE THOUGHTS OF A MAN WHILE THEY WERE STILL IN HIS HEART
(in Color)
THE CACICA FAR-LOOKING MEETS THE IRON SHIRTS
THE DESERT
THE CONDOR THAT HAS HIS NEST ON EL MORRO
THE DOG SOLDIERS
LINE ART OF BUFFALO
THE TRAIL BOOK
I
HOW OLIVER AND DORCAS JANE FOUND THE TRAIL
From the time that he had first found, himself alone with them, Oliver
had felt sure that the animals could come alive again if they wished.
That was one blowy afternoon about a week after his father had been made
night engineer and nobody had come into the Museum for several hours.
Oliver had been sitting for some time in front of the Buffalo case,
wondering what might be at the other end of the trail. The cows that
stood midway in it had such a _going_ look. He was sure it must lead,
past the hummock where the old bull flourished his tail, to one of those
places where he had always wished to be. All at once, as the boy sat
there thinking about it, the glass case disappeared and the trail shot
out like a dark snake over a great stretch of rolling, grass-covered
prairie.
He could see the tops of the grasses stirring like the hair on the old
Buffalo's coat, and the ripple of water on the beaver pool which was
just opposite and yet somehow only to be reached after long travel
through the Buffalo Country. The wind moved on the grass, on the surface
of the water and the young leaves of the alders, and over all the
animals came the start and stir of life.
And then the slow, shuffling steps of the Museum attendant startled it
all into stillness again.
The attendant spoke to Oliver as he passed, for even a small boy is
worth talking to when you have been all day in a Museum where nothing is
new to you and nobody comes.
"You want to look out, son," said the attendant, who really liked the
boy and hadn't a notion what sort of ideas he was putting into Oliver's
head. "If you ain't careful, some of them things will come downstairs
some night and go off with ye."
And why should MacShea have said that if he hadn't known for certain
that the animals _did_ come alive at night? That was the way Oliver put
it when he was trying to describe this extraordinary experience to
his sister.
Dorcas Jane, who was eleven and a half and not at all imaginative, eyed
him suspiciously. Oliver had such a way of stating things that were not
at all believable, in a way that made them seem the likeliest things in
the world. He was even capable of acting for days as if things were so,
which you knew from the beginning were only the most delightful of
make-believes. Life on this basis was immensely more exciting, but then
you never knew whether or not he might be what some of his boy friends
called "stringing you," so when Oliver began to hint darkly at his
belief that the stuffed animals in the Mammal room of the Museum came
alive at night and had larks of their own, Dorcas Jane offered the most
noncommittal objection that occurred to her.
"They couldn't," she said; "the night watchman wouldn't let them." There
were watchmen, she knew, who went the rounds of every floor.
But, insisted Oliver, why should they have watchmen at all, if not to
prevent people from breaking in and disturbing the animals when they
were busy with affairs of their own? He meant to stay up there himself
some night and see what it was all about; and as he went on to explain
how it would be possible to slip up the great stair while the watchmen
were at the far end of the long hall, and of the places one could hide
if the watchman came along when he wasn't wanted, he said "we" and "us."
For, of course, he meant to take Dorcas Jane with him. Where would be
the fun of such an adventure if you had it alone? And besides, Oliver
had discovered that it was not at all difficult to scare himself with the
things he had merely imagined. There were times when Dorcas Jane's frank
disbelief was a great comfort to him. Still, he wasn't the sort of boy
to be scared before anything has really happened, so when Dorcas Jane
suggested that they didn't know what the animals might do to any one who
went among them uninvited, he threw it off stoutly.
"Pshaw! They can't do anything to us! They're stuffed, Silly!"
And to Dorcas Jane, who was by this time completely under the spell of
the adventure, it seemed quite likely that the animals should be stuffed
so that they couldn't hurt you, and yet not stuffed so much that they
couldn't come alive again.
It was all of a week before they could begin. There is a kind of feeling
you have to have about an adventure without which the affair doesn't
come off properly. Anybody who has been much by himself in the woods has
had it; or sometime, when you are all alone in the house, all at once
there comes a kind of pricking of your skin and a tightness in your
chest, not at all unpleasant, and a kind of feeling that the furniture
has its eye on you, or that some one behind your shoulder is about to
speak, and immediately after that something happens. Or you feel sure it
would have happened if somebody hadn't interrupted.
Dorcas Jane _never_ had feelings like that. But about a week after
Oliver had proposed to her that they spend a part of the night in the
long gallery, he was standing in front of the Buffalo case, wondering
what actually did happen when a buffalo caught you. Quite unexpectedly,
deep behind the big bull's glassy eye, he caught a gleam as of another
eye looking at him, meaningly, and with a great deal of friendliness.
Oliver felt prickles come out suddenly all over his body, and without
quite knowing why, he began to move away from that place, tip-toe and
slippingly, like a wild creature in the woods when it does not know who
may be about. He told himself it would never do to have the animals come
alive without Dorcas Jane, and before all those stupid, staring folk who
might come in at any minute and spoil everything.
That night, after their father had gone off clanking to his furnaces,
Dorcas heard her brother tapping on the partition between their rooms,
as he did sometimes when they played "prisoner." She knew exactly what
he meant by it and tapped back that she was ready.
Everything worked out just as they had planned. They heard the strange,
hollow-sounding echoes of the watchman's voice dying down the halls, as
stair by stair they dropped the street lamps below them, and saw strange
shadows start out of things that were perfectly harmless and familiar
by day.
There was no light in the gallery except faint up-and-down glimmers from
the glass of the cases, and here and there the little spark of an eye.
Outside there was a whole world of light, the milky way of the street
with the meteor roar of the Elevated going by, processions of small
moons marching below them across the park, and blazing constellations in
the high windows opposite. Tucked into one of the window benches between
the cases, the children seemed to swing into another world where almost
anything might happen. And yet for at least a quarter of an hour
nothing did.
"I don't believe nothing ever does," said Dorcas Jane, who was not at
all careful of her grammar.
"Sh-sh!" said Oliver. They had sat down directly in front of the Buffalo
Trail, though Dorcas would have preferred to be farther away from the
Polar Bear. For suppose it hadn't been properly stuffed! But Oliver had
eyes only for the trail.
"I want to see where it begins and where it goes," he insisted.
So they sat and waited, and though the great building was never allowed
to grow quite cold, it was cool enough to make it pleasant for them to
sit close together and for Dorcas to tuck her hand into the crook of
his arm....
All at once the Bull Buffalo shook himself.
[Illustration: Line Art of Mastadons]
II
WHAT THE BUFFALO CHIEF TOLD
"_Wake! Wake!_" said the Bull Buffalo, with a roll to it, as though the
word had been shouted in a deep voice down an empty barrel. He shook the
dust out of his mane and stamped his fore-foot to set the herd in
motion. There were thousands of them feeding as far as the eye could
reach, across the prairie, yearlings and cows with their calves of that
season, and here and there a bull, tossing his heavy head and sending up
light puffs of dust under the pawings of his hoof as he took up the
leader's signal.
"Wake! Wa--ake!"
It rolled along the ground like thunder. At the sound the herds gathered
themselves from the prairie, they turned back from the licks, they rose
up _plop_ from the wallows, trotting singly in the trails that rayed out
to every part of the pastures and led up toward the high ridges.
"Wa-ak--" began the old bull; then he stopped short, threw up his head,
sniffing the wind, and ended with a sharp snort which changed the words
to "_What? What?_"
"What's this," said the Bull Buffalo, "Pale Faces?"
"They are very young," said the young cow, the one with the _going_
look. She had just been taken into the herd that season and had the
place of the favorite next to the leader.
"If you please, sir," said Oliver, "we only wished to know where the
trail went."
"Why," said the Buffalo Chief, surprised, "to the Buffalo roads, of
course. We must be changing pasture." As he pawed contempt upon the
short, dry grass, the rattlesnake, that had been sunning himself at the
foot of the hummock, slid away under the bleached buffalo skull, and the
small, furry things dived everywhere into their burrows.
"That is the way always," said the young cow, "when the Buffalo People
begin their travels. Not even a wolf will stay in the midst of the
herds; there would be nothing left of him by the time the hooves had
passed over."
The children could see how that might be, for as the thin lines began to
converge toward the high places, it was as if the whole prairie had
turned black and moving. Where the trails drew out of the flat lands to
the watersheds, they were wide enough for eight or ten to walk abreast,
trodden hard and white as country roads. There was a deep, continuous
murmur from the cows like the voice of the earth talking to itself
at twilight.
"Come," said the old bull, "we must be moving."
"But what is that?" said Dorcas Jane, as a new sound came from the
direction of the river, a long chant stretching itself like a snake
across the prairie, and as they listened there were words that lifted
and fell with an odd little pony joggle.
"That is the Pawnees, singing their travel song," said the Buffalo
Chief.
And as he spoke they could see the eagle bonnets of the tribesmen coming
up the hollow, every man mounted, with his round shield and the point of
his lance tilted forward. After them came the women on the pack-ponies
with the goods, and the children stowed on the travoises of lodge-poles
that trailed from the ponies' withers.
"Ha-ah," said the old bull. "One has laid his ear to the ground in their
lodges and has heard the earth tremble with the passing of the
Buffalo People."
"But where do they go?" said Dorcas.
"They follow the herds," said the old bull, "for the herds are their
food and their clothes and their housing. It is the Way Things Are that
the Buffalo People should make the trails and men should ride in them.
They go up along the watersheds where the floods cannot mire, where the
snow is lightest, and there are the best lookouts."
"And, also, there is the easiest going," said a new voice with a snarly
running whine in it. It came from a small gray beast with pointed ears
and a bushy tail, and the smut-tipped nose that all coyotes have had
since their very first father blacked himself bringing fire to Man from
the Burning Mountain. He had come up very softly at the heels of the
Buffalo Chief, who wheeled suddenly and blew steam from his nostrils.
"That," he said, "is because of the calves. It is not because a buffalo
cannot go anywhere it pleases him; down ravines where a horse would
stumble and up cliffs where even you, O Smut Nose, cannot follow."
"True, Great Chief," said the Coyote, "but I seem to remember trails
that led through the snow to very desirable places."
This was not altogether kind, for it is well known that it is only when
snow has lain long enough on the ground to pack and have a hard coating
of ice, that the buffaloes dare trust themselves upon it. When it is
new-fallen and soft they flounder about helplessly until they die of
starvation, and the wolves pull them down, or the Indians come and kill
them. But the old bull had the privilege which belongs to greatness, of
not being obliged to answer impertinent things that were said to him. He
went on just as if nothing had interrupted, telling how the buffalo
trails had found the mountain passes and how they were rutted deep into
the earth by the migrating herds.
"I have heard," he said, "that when the Pale Faces came into the country
they found no better roads anywhere than the buffalo traces--"
"Also," purred Moke-icha, "I have heard that they found trails through
lands where no buffalo had been before them." Moke-icha, the Puma, lay
on a brown boulder that matched so perfectly with her watered coat that
if it had not been for the ruffling of the wind on her short fur and the
twitchings of her tail, the children might not have discovered her.
"Look," she said, stretching out one of her great pads toward the south,
where the trail ran thin and white across a puma-colored land, streaked
with black lava and purple shadow. Far at the other end it lifted in
red, wall-sided buttes where the homes of the Cliff People stuck like
honeycombs in the wind-scoured hollows.
"Now I recall a trail in that country," said Moke-icha, "that was older
than the oldest father's father of them could remember. Four times a
year the People of the Cliffs went down on it to the Sacred Water, and
came back with bags of salt on their shoulders."
Even as she spoke they could see the people coming out of the Cliff
dwellings and the priests going into the kivas preparing for
the journey.
That was how it was; when any animal spoke of the country he knew best,
that was what the children saw. And yet all the time there was the
beginning of the buffalo trail in front of them, and around them, drawn
there by that something of himself which every man puts into the work of
his hands, the listening tribesmen. One of these spoke now in answer to
Moke-icha.
"Also in my part of the country," he said, "long before there were Pale
Faces, there were trade trails and graded ways, and walled ways between
village and village. We traded for cherts as far south as Little River
in the Tenasas Mountains, and north to the Sky-Blue Water for copper
which was melted out of rocks, and there were workings at Flint Ridge
that were older than the great mound at Cahokia."
"Oh," cried both the children at once, "Mound-Builders!"--and they
stared at him with interest.
He was probably not any taller than the other Indians, but seemed so on
account of his feather headdress which was built up in front with a
curious cut-out copper ornament. They thought they recognized the broad
banner stone of greenish slate which he carried, the handle of which was
tasseled with turkey beards and tiny tails of ermine. He returned the
children's stare in the friendliest possible fashion, twirling his
banner stone as a policeman does his night stick.
"Were you? Mound-Builders, you know?" questioned Oliver.
"You could call us that. We called ourselves Tallegewi, and our trails
were old before the buffalo had crossed east of the Missi-Sippu, the
Father of all Rivers. Then the country was full of the horned people,
thick as flies in the Moon of Stopped Waters." As he spoke, he pointed
to the moose and wapiti trooping down the shallow hills to the
watering-places. They moved with a dancing motion, and the multitude of
their horns was like a forest walking, a young forest in the spring
before the leaves are out and there is a clicking of antlered bough on
bough. "They would come in twenty abreast to the licks where we lay in
wait for them," said the Tallega. "They were the true trail-makers."
"Then you must have forgotten what I had to do with it," said a voice
that seemed to come from high up in the air, so that they all looked up
suddenly and would have been frightened at the huge bulk, if the voice
coming from it in a squeaky whisper had not made it seem ridiculous. It
was the Mastodon, who had strolled in from the pre-historic room, though
it was a wonder to the children how so large a beast could move
so silently.
"Hey," said a Lenni-Lenape, who had sat comfortably smoking all this
time, "I've heard of you--there was an old Telling of my
father's--though I hardly think I believed it. What are you doing here?"
"I've a perfect right to come," said the Mastodon, shuffling
embarrassedly from foot to foot. "I was the first of my kind to have a
man belonging to me, and it was I that showed him the trail to the sea."
"Oh, please, would you tell us about it?" said Dorcas.
The Mastodon rocked to and fro on his huge feet, embarrassedly.
"If--if it would please the company--"
Everybody looked at the Buffalo Chief, for, after all, it was he who
began the party. The old bull pawed dust and blew steam from his
nostrils, which was a perfectly safe thing to do in case the story
didn't turn out to his liking.
"Tell, tell," he agreed, in a voice like a man shouting down twenty rain
barrels at once.
And looking about slyly with his little twinkling eyes at the attentive
circle, the Mastodon began.
III
HOW THE MASTODON HAPPENED FIRST TO BELONG TO A MAN, AS TOLD BY ARRUMPA
"In my time, everything, even the shape of the land was different. From
Two Rivers it was all marsh, marsh and swamp with squidgy islands, with
swamp and marsh again till you came to hills and hard land, beyond which
was the sea. Nothing grew then but cane and coarse grass, and the water
rotting the land until there was no knowing where it was safe treading
from year to year. Not that it mattered to my people. We kept to the
hills where there was plenty of good browse, and left the swamp to the
Grass-Eaters--bunt-headed, woolly-haired eaters of grass!"
Up came Arrumpa's trunk to trumpet his contempt, and out from the
hillslope like a picture on a screen stretched for a moment the flat
reed-bed of Two Rivers, with great herds of silly, elephant-looking
creatures feeding there, with huge incurving trunks and backs that
sloped absurdly from a high fore-hump. They rootled in the tall grass or
shouldered in long, snaky lines through the canes, their
trunks waggling.
"Mammoths they were called," said Arrumpa, "and they hid in the swamp
because their tusks curved in and they were afraid of Saber-Tooth, the
Tiger. There were a great many of them, though not so many as our
people, and also there was Man. It was the year my tusks began to grow
that I first saw him. We were coming up from the river to the
bedding-ground and there was a thin rim of the moon like a tusk over the
hill's shoulder. I remember the damp smell of the earth and the good
smell of the browse after the sun goes down, and between them a thin
blue mist curling with a stinging smell that made prickles come along
the back of my neck.
"'What is that?' I said, for I walked yet with my mother.
"'It is the smell which Man makes so that other people may know where he
is and keep away from him,' she said, for my mother had never been
friends with Man and she did not know any better.
"Then we came up over the ridge and saw them, about a score, naked and
dancing on the naked front of the hill. They had a fire in their midst
from which the blue smell went up, and as they danced they sang--
"'Hail, moon, young moon!
Hail, hail, young moon!
Bring me something that I wish,
Hail, moon, hail!'
"--catching up fire-sticks in their hands and tossing them toward the
tusk of the moon. That was how they made the moon grow, by working fire
into it, so my man told me afterwards. But it was not until I began to
walk by myself that he found me.
"I had come up from the lower hills all one day," said the Mastodon.
"There was a feel in the air as if the Great Cold had breathed into it.
It curdled blue as pond water, and under the blueness the forest color
showed like weed under water. I walked by myself and did not care who
heard me. Now and then I tore up a young tree, for my tusks had grown
fast that year and it was good to feel the tree tug at its roots and
struggle with me. Farther up, the wind walked on the dry leaves with a
sound like a thousand wapiti trooping down the mountain. Every little
while, for want of something to do, I charged it. Then I carried a pine,
which I had torn up, on my tusks, until the butt struck a boulder which
went down the hill with an avalanche of small stones that set all the
echoes shouting.
"In the midst of it I lifted up my voice and said that I was I, Arrumpa,
walking by myself,--and just then a dart struck me. The men had come up
under cover of the wind on either side so that there was nothing for me
to do but to move forward, which I did, somewhat hurriedly.
"I had not come to my full size then, but I was a good weight for my
years," said Arrumpa modestly,--"a very good weight, and it was my
weight that saved me, for the edge of the ravine that opened suddenly in
front of me crumbled, so that I came down into the bottom of it with a
great mass of rubbish and broken stone, with a twisted knee, and very
much astonished.
"I remember blowing to get the blood and dust out of my eyes,--there was
a dart stuck in my forehead,--and seeing the men come swarming over the
edge of the ravine, which was all walled in on every side, shaking their
spears and singing. That was the way with men; whatever they did they
had to sing about it. 'Ha-ahe-ah!' they sang--
"'Great Chief, you're about to die,
The Gods have said it.'
"So they came capering, but there was blood in my eyes and my knee hurt
me, so when one of them stuck his spear almost up to the haft in my
side, I tossed him. I took him up lightly on my tusks and he lay still
at the far end of the ravine where I had dropped him. That stopped the
shouting; but it broke out again suddenly, for the women had come down
the wild vines on the walls, with their young on their shoulders, and
the wife of the man I had tossed found him. The noise of the hunters was
as nothing to the noise she made at me. Madness overtook her; she left
off howling over her man and seizing her son by the hand,--he was no
more than half-grown, not up to my shoulder,--she pushed him in front of
me. 'Take him! Take my son, Man-Killer!' she screamed. 'After you have
taken the best of the tribe, will you stop at a youngling?' Then all the
others screeched at her like gulls frightened from their rock, and
stopped silent in great fear to see what I would do about it.
"I did not know what to do, for there was no way I could tell her I was
sorry I had killed her husband; and the lad stood where she had pushed
him, not making any noise at all but a sharp, steady breathing. So I
took him up in my trunk, for, indeed, I did not know what to do, and as
I held him at the level of my eyes, I saw a strange thing,--that the boy
was not afraid. He was not in the least afraid, but very angry.
"'I hate you, Arrumpa,' he said, 'because you have killed my father. I
am too little to kill you for it now, but when I am a man I shall kill
you.' He struck me with his fists. 'Put me down, Man-Killer!'
"So I put him down. What else was there to do? And there was a sensation
in my breast, a sensation as of bending the knees and bowing the
neck--not at all unpleasant--He stood where I placed him, between my
tusks, and one of the hunters, who was a man in authority, called out to
him to come away while they killed me.
"'That you shall not,' said my manling, 'for he has killed my father,
therefore he is mine to kill according to the custom of killing.'
"Then the man was angry.
"'Come away, little fool,' he said. 'He is our meat. Have we not
followed him for three days and trapped him?'
"The boy looked at him under his brows, drawn level.
"'That was my father's spear that stuck in him, Opata,' he said.
"Now, as the man spoke, I began to see what they had done to me these
three days, for there was no way out of the ravine, and the women had
brought their fleshing-knives and baskets: but the boy was quicker even
than my anger. He reached up a hand to either of my tusks,--he could
barely lay hands on them,--and his voice shook, though I do not think it
was with anger. 'He is mine to kill,' he said, 'according to custom. He
is my Arrumpa, and I call the tribe to witness. Not one of you shall lay
hands on him until one of us has killed the other.'
"Then I lifted up my trunk over him, for my heart swelled against the
hunters, and I gave voice as a bull should when he walks by himself.
"'Arr-rr-ump!' I said. And the people were all silent with astonishment.
"Finally the man who had first spoken, spoke again, very humbly, 'Great
Chief, give us leave to take away your father.' So we gave them leave.
They took the hurt man--his back was broken--away by the vine ladders,
and my young man went and lay face down where his father had lain, and
shook with many strange noises while water came out of his eyes. When he
sat up at last and saw me blowing dust on the spear-cut in my side to
stop the bleeding, he gathered broad leaves, dipped them in pine gum,
and laid them on the cut. Then I blew dust on these, and seeing that I
was more comfortable, Taku-Wakin--that was what I learned to call
him--saluted with both hands to his head, palms outward. 'Friend,' he
said,--'for if you are not my friend I think I have not one other in the
world,--besides, I am too little to kill you,--I go to bury my father.'
"For three days I bathed my knee in the spring, and saw faces come to
peer about the edge of it and heard the beat of the village drums. The
third day my young man came, wearing his father's collar of bear's
teeth, with neither fire-stick nor food nor weapon upon him. "'Now I am
all the man my mother has,' he said; 'I must do what is necessary to
become a tribesman.'
"I did not know then what he meant, but it seems it was a custom."
All the Indians in the group that had gathered about the Mastodon,
nodded at this.
"It was so in my time," said the Mound-Builder. "When a youth has come
to the age where he is counted a man, he goes apart and neither eats nor
drinks until, in the shape of some living thing, the Great Mystery has
revealed itself to him.
"It was so he explained it to me," agreed Arrumpa; "and for three days
he ate and drank nothing, but walked by himself talking to his god.
Other times he would talk to me, scratching my hurts and taking the
ticks out of my ears, until--I do not know what it was, but between me
and Taku-Wakin it happened that we understood, each of us, what the
other was thinking in his heart as well as if we had words--Is this also
a custom?"
A look of intelligence passed between the members of his audience.
"Once to every man," said an Indian who leaned against Moke-icha's
boulder, "when he shuts all thought of killing out of his heart and
gives himself to the beast as to a brother, knowledge which is different
from the knowledge of the chase comes to both of them.
"Oh," said Oliver, "I had a dog once--" But he became very much
embarrassed when he discovered that he had drawn the attention of the
company. It had always been difficult for him to explain why it was he
had felt so certain that his dog and he had always known what the other
was thinking; but the Indians and the animals understood him.
"All this Taku explained to me," went on Arrumpa. "The fourth day, when
Taku fainted for lack of food, I cradled him in my tusks and was greatly
troubled. At last I laid him on the fresh grass by the spring and blew
water on him. Then he sat up laughing and spluttering, but faintly.
"'Now am I twice a fool,' he said, 'not to know from the first that you
are my Medicine, the voice of the Mystery.'
"Then he shouted for his mother, who came down from the top of the
ravine, very timidly, and fed him.
"After that he would come to me every day, sometimes with a bough of
wild apples or a basket of acorns, and I would set him on my neck so he
could scratch between my ears and tell me all his troubles. His father,
he said, had been a strong man who put himself at the head of the five
chiefs of the tribe and persuaded them to leave off fighting one another
and band together against the enemy tribes. Opata, the man who had
wished to kill me, was the man likeliest to be made High Chief in his
father's place.
"'And then my bad days will begin,' said Taku-Wakin, 'for he hates me
for my father's sake, and also a little for yours, Old Two-Tails, and he
will persuade the Council to give my mother to another man and I shall
be made subject to him. Worse,' he said,--'the Great Plan of my father
will come to nothing.'
"He was always talking about this Great Plan and fretting over it, but I
was too new to the customs of men to ask what he meant by it.
"'If I had but a Sign,' he said, 'then they would give me my father's
place in the Council ... but I am too little, and I have not yet killed
anything worth mentioning.'
"So he would sit on my neck and drum with his heels while he thought,
and there did not seem to be anything I could do about it. By this time
my knee was quite well. I had eaten all the brush in the ravine and was
beginning to be lonely. Taku wasn't able to visit me so often, for he
had his mother and young brothers to kill for.
"So one night when the moon came walking red on the trail of the day,
far down by Two Rivers I heard some of my friends trumpeting; therefore
I pulled down young trees along the sides of the ravine, with great
lumps of earth, and battered the rotten cliffs until they crumbled in a
heap by which I scrambled up again.
"I must have traveled a quarter of the moon's course before I heard the
patter of bare feet in the trail and a voice calling:--
"'Up! Take me up, Arrumpa!'
"So I took him up, quite spent with running, and yet not so worn out but
that he could smack me soundly between the eyes, as no doubt I deserved.
"'Beast of a bad heart,' he said, 'did I not tell you that to-morrow the
moon is full and the Five Chiefs hold Council?' So he had, but my thick
wits had made nothing of it. 'If you leave me this night,' said Taku,
'then they will say that my Medicine has left me and my father's place
will be given to Opata.'
"'Little Chief,' I said, 'I did not know that you had need of me, but it
came into my head that I also had need of my own people. Besides, the
brush is eaten.'
"'True, true!' he said, and drummed on my forehead. 'Take me home,' he
said at last, 'for I have followed you half the night, and I must not
seem wearied at the Council.'
"So I took him back as far as the Arch Rock which springs high over the
trail by which the men of Taku's village went out to the hunting. There
was a cleft under the wing of the Arch, close to the cliff, and every
man going out to the hunt threw a dart at it, as an omen. If it stuck,
the omen was good, but if the point of the dart broke against the face
of the cliff and fell back, the hunter returned to his hut, and if he
hunted at all that day, he went out in another direction. We could see
the shafts of the darts fast in the cleft, bristling in the moonlight.
"'Wait here, under the Arch,' said Taku-Wakin, 'till I see if the arrow
of my thought finds a cleft to stick into.'
"So we waited, watching the white, webby moons of the spiders, wet in
the grass, and the man huts sleeping on the hill, and felt the Dawn's
breath pricking the skin of our shoulders. The huts were mere heaps of
brush like rats' nests.
"'Shall I walk on the huts for a sign, Little Chief?' said I.
"'Not that, Old Hilltop,' he laughed; 'there are people under the huts,
and what good is a Sign without people?'
"Then he told me how his father had become great by thinking, not for
his own clan alone, but for all the people--it was because of the long
reach of his power that they called him Long-Hand. Now that he was gone
there would be nothing but quarrels and petty jealousies. 'They will
hunt the same grounds twice over,' said Taku-Wakin; 'they will kill one
another when they should be killing their enemies, and in the end the
Great Cold will get them.'
"Every year the Great Cold crept nearer. It
came like a strong arm and pressed the people west and south so that the
tribes bore hard on one another.
"'Since old time,' said Taku-Wakin, 'my people have been sea people. But
the People of the Great Cold came down along the ice-rim and cut them
off from it. My father had a plan to get to the sea, and a Talking Stick
which he was teaching me to understand, but I cannot find it in any of
the places where he used to hide it. If I had the Stick I think they
would make me chief in my father's place. But if Opata is made chief,
then I must give it to him if I find it, and Opata will have all the
glory. If I had but a Sign to keep them from making Opata chief...' So
he drummed on my head with his heels while I leaned against the Arch
Rock--oh, yes, I can sleep very comfortably, standing--and the moon slid
down the hill until it shone clear under the rock and touched the
feathered butts of the arrows. Then Taku woke me.
"'Up, put me up, Arrumpa! For now I have thought of a Sign that even the
Five Chiefs will have respect for.'
"So I put him up until his foot caught in the cleft of the rock and he
pried out five of the arrows.
"'Arrows of the Five Chiefs,' he said,--'that the chiefs gave to the
gods to keep, and the gods have given to me again!'
"That was the way always with Taku-Wakin, he kept all the god customs of
the people, but he never doubted, when he had found what he wanted to
do, that the gods would be on his side. He showed me how every arrow was
a little different from the others in the way the blood drain was cut or
the shaft feathered.
"'No fear,' he said. 'Every man will know his own when I come to the
Council.'
"He hugged the arrows to his breast and laughed over them, so I hugged
him with my trunk, and we agreed that once in every full moon I was to
come to Burnt Woods, and wait until he called me with something that he
took from his girdle and twirled on a thong. I do not know what it was
called, but it had a voice like young thunder.
"Like this?" The Mound-Builder cut the air with an oddly shaped bit of
wood swung on an arm's-length of string, once lightly, like a covey of
quail rising, and then loud like a wind in the full-branched forest.
"Just such another. Thrice he swung it so that I might not mistake the
sound, and that was the last I saw of him, hugging his five arrows, with
the moon gone pale like a meal-cake, and the tame wolves that skulk
between the huts for scraps, slinking off as he spoke to them."
"And did they--the Five Chiefs, I mean--have respect for his arrows?"
Dorcas Jane wondered.
"So he told me. They came from all the nine villages and sat in a
council ring, each with the elders of his village behind him, and in
front his favorite weapon, tied with eagle feathers for enemies he had
slain, and red marks for battles, and other signs and trophies. At the
head of the circle there was the spear of Long-Hand, and a place left
for the one who should be elected to sit in it. But before the Council
had time to begin, came Taku-Wakin with his arms folded--though he told
me it was to hide how his heart jumped in his bosom--and took his
father's seat. Around the ring of the chiefs and elders ran a growl like
the circling of thunder in sultry weather, and immediately it was turned
into coughing; every man trying to eat his own exclamation, for, as he
sat, Taku laid out, in place of a trophy, the five arrows.
"'Do we sit at a game of knuckle-bone?' said Opata at last, 'or is this
a Council of the Elders?'
"'Game or Council,' said Taku-Wakin, 'I sit in my father's place until I
have a Sign from him whom he will have to sit there.'"
"But I don't understand--" began Oliver, looking about the circle of
listening Indians. "His father was dead, wasn't he?"
"What is 'dead'?" said the Lenni-Lenape; "Indians do not know. Our
friends go out of their bodies; where? Into another--or into a beast?
When I was still strapped in my basket my father set me on a bear that
he had killed and prayed that the bear's cunning and strength should
pass into me. Taku-Wakin's people thought that the heart of Long-Hand
might have gone into the Mastodon."
"Why not?" agreed Arrumpa gravely. "I remember that Taku would call me
Father at times, and--if he was very fond of me--Grandfather. But all he
wanted at that tune was to keep Opata from being elected in his father's
place, and Opata, who understood this perfectly, was very angry.
"'It is the custom,' he said, 'when a chief sleeps in the High
Places,'--he meant the hilltops where they left their dead on poles or
tied to the tree branches,--'that we elect another to his place in
the Council.'
"'Also it is a custom,' said Taku-Wakin, 'to bring the token of his
great exploit into Council and quicken the heart by hearing of it. You
have heard, O Chiefs," he said, "that my people had a plan for the good
of the people, and it has come to me in my heart that that plan was
stronger in him than death. For he was a man who finished what he had
begun, and it may be that he is long-handed enough to reach back from
the place where he has gone. And this is a Sign to me, that he has taken
his cut stick, which had the secret of his plan, with him.'
"Taku-Wakin fiddled with the arrows, laying them straight, hardly daring
to look up at Opata, for if the chief had his father's cut stick, now
would be the time that he would show it. Out of the tail of his eye he
could see that the rest of the Council were startled. That was the way
with men. Me they would trap, and take the skin of Saber-Tooth to wrap
their cubs in, but at the hint of a Sign, or an old custom slighted,
they would grow suddenly afraid. Then Taku looked up and saw Opata
stroking his face with his hand to hide what he was thinking. He was no
fool, and he saw that if the election was pressed, Taku-Wakin, boy as he
was, would sit in his father's place because of the five arrows.
Taku-Wakin stood up and stretched out his hand to the Council.
"'Is it agreed, O Chiefs, that you keep my father's place until there is
a Sign?'--and a deep _Hu-huh_ ran all about the circle. It was sign
enough for them that the son of Long-Hand played unhurt with arrows that
had been given to the gods. Taku stretched his hand to Opata, 'Is it
agreed, O Chief?'
"'So long as the tribe comes to no harm,' said Opata, making the best of
a bad business. 'It shall be kept until Long-Hand or his Talking Rod
comes back to us.'
"'And,' said Taku-Wakin to me, 'whether Opata or I first sits in it,
depends on which one of us can first produce a Sign.'"
[Illustration: TAKU AND ARRUMPA.]
IV
THE SECOND PART OF THE MASTODON STORY CONCERNING THE TRAIL TO THE SEA
AND THE TALKING STICK OF TAKU-WAKIN
"It was the Talking Stick of his father that Taku-Wakin wanted," said
Arrumpa. "He still thought Opata might have it, for every now and then
Taku would catch him coming back with marsh mud on his moccasins. That
was how I began to understand that the Great Plan was really a plan to
find a way _through_ the marsh to the sea on the other side of it.
"'Opata has the Stick,' said Taku, 'but it will not talk to him;
therefore he goes, as my father did, when the waters are low and the
hummocks of hard ground stand up, to find a safe way for the tribe to
follow. But my father had worked as far as the Grass Flats and beyond
them, to a place of islands.'
"'Squidgy Islands,' I told him. 'The Grass-Eaters go there to drop their
calves every season.' Taku kicked me behind the ears.
"'Said I not you were a beast of a bad heart!' he scolded. But how
should I know he would care to hear about a lot of silly Mammoths.
'Also,' he said, 'you are my Medicine. You shall find me the trail of
the Talking Stick, and I, Taku, son of Long-Hand, shall lead
the people.'
"'In six moons,' I told him, 'the Grass-Eaters go to the Islands to
calve--'
"'In which time,' said Taku, 'the chiefs will have quarreled six times,
and Opata will have eaten me. Drive them, Arrumpa, drive them!'
"Umph, uh-ump!" chuckled the old beast reminiscently. "We drove; we
drove. What else was there to do? Taku-Wakin was my man. Besides, it was
great fun. One-Tusk helped me. He was one of our bachelor herd who had
lost a tusk in his first fight, which turned out greatly to his
advantage. He would come sidling up to a refractory young cow with his
eyes twinkling, and before anybody suspected he could give such a prod
with his one tusk as sent her squealing.... But that came afterward. The
Mammoth herd that fed on our edge of the Great Swamp was led by a
wrinkled old cow, wise beyond belief. Scrag we called her. She would
take the herd in to the bedding-ground by the river, to a landing-point
on the opposite side, never twice the same, and drift noiselessly
through the canebrake, choosing blowy hours when the swish of cane over
woolly backs was like the run of the wind. Days when the marsh would be
full of tapirs wallowing and wild pig rootling and fighting, there might
be hundreds feeding within sound of you and not a hint of it except the
occasional _toot-toot_ of some silly cow calling for Scrag, or a young
bull blowing water.
"They bedded at the Grass Flats, but until Scrag herself had a mind to
take the trail to the Squidgy Islands, there was nobody but Saber-Tooth
could persuade her.
"'Then Saber-Tooth shall help us,' said my man.
"Not for nothing was he called Taku-Wakin, which means 'The Wonderful.'
He brought a tiger cub's skin of his father's killing, dried stiff and
sewed up with small stones inside it. At one end there was a thong with
a loop in it, and it smelled of tiger. I could see the tip of One-Tusk's
trunk go up with a start every time he winded it. There was a curled
moon high up in the air like a feather, and a moon-white tusk glinting
here and there, where the herds drifted across the flats. There was no
trouble about our going among them so long as Scrag did not wind us.
_They_ claimed to be kin to us, and they cared nothing for Man even when
they smelled him. We came sidling up to a nervous young cow, and Taku
dropped from my neck long enough to slip the thong over a hind foot as
she lifted it. The thong was wet at first and scarcely touched her.
Presently it tightened. Then the cow shook her foot to free it and the
skin rattled. She squealed nervously and started out to find Scrag, who
was feeding on the far side of the hummock, and at every step the
tiger-skin rattled and bounced against her. Eyes winked red with alarm
and trunks came lifting out of the tall grass like serpents. One-Tusk
moved silently, prod-prodding; we could hear the click of ivory and the
bunting of shoulder against shoulder. Then some silly cow had a whiff of
the skin that bounded along in their tracks like a cat, and raised the
cry of 'Tiger! Tiger!' Far on the side from us, in the direction of the
Squidgy Islands, Scrag trumpeted, followed by frantic splashing as the
frightened herd plunged into the reed-beds. Taku slipped from my neck,
shaking with laughter.
"'Follow, follow,' he said; 'I go to bring up the people.'
"It was two days before Scrag stopped running.
"From the Grass Flats on to the Islands it was all one reed-bed where
the water gathered into runnels between hummocks of rotten rushes, where
no trail would lie and any false step might plunge you into black bog to
the shoulder. About halfway we found the tiger-skin tramped into the
mire, but as soon as we struck the Islands I turned back, for I was in
need of good oak browse, and I wished to find out what had become of
Taku-Wakin. It was not until one evening when I had come well up into
the hills for a taste of fir, that I saw him, black against the sun with
the tribe behind him. The Five Chiefs walked each in front of his own
village, except that Taku-Wakin's own walked after Opata, and there were
two of the Turtle clan, each with his own head man, and two under
Apunkéwis. Before all walked Taku-Wakin holding a peeled stick upright
and seeing the end of the trail, but not what lay close in front of him.
He did not even see me as I slipped around the procession and left a wet
trail for him to follow.
"That was how we crossed to the Islands, village by village, with
Taku-Wakin close on my trail, which was the trail of the Grass-Eaters.
They swam the sloughs with their children on their shoulders, and made
rafts of reeds to push their food bundles over. By night they camped on
the hummocks and built fires that burned for days in the thick litter of
reeds. Red reflections glanced like fishes along the water. Then there
would be the drums and the--the thunder-twirler--"
"But what kept him so long and how did he persuade them?" Dorcas Jane
squirmed with curiosity.
"He'd been a long time working out the trail through the canebrake,"
said Arrumpa, "making a Talking Stick as his father had taught him; one
ring for a day's journey, one straight mark for so many man's paces;
notches for turns. When he could not remember his father's marks he made
up others. When he came to his village again he found they had all gone
over to Opata's. Apunkéwis, who had the two villages under Black Rock
and was a friend of Long-Hand, told him that there would be a Sign.
"'There will,' said Taku-Wakin, 'but I shall bring it.' He knew that
Opata meant mischief, but he could not guess what. All the way to
Opata's his thought went round and round like a fire-stick in the
hearth-hole. When he heard the drums he flared up like a spark in the
tinder. Earlier in the evening there had been a Big Eating at Opata's,
and now the men were dancing.
"'_Eyah, eyah!_' they sang.
"Taku-Wakin whirled like a spark into the ring. '_Eyah, eyah!_' he
shouted,--
"'Great are the people
They have found a sign,
The sign of the Talking Rod!
Eyah! My people!'
"He planted it full in the firelight where it rocked and beckoned.
'_Eyah_, the rod is calling,' he sang.
"The moment he had sight of Opata's face he knew that whatever the chief
had meant to do, he did not have his father's Stick. Taku caught up his
own and twirled it, and finally he hid it under his coat, for if any one
had handled it he could have seen that this was not the Stick of
Long-Hand, but fresh-peeled that season. But because Opata wanted the
Stick of Long-Hand, he thought any stick of Taku's must be the one he
wanted. And what Opata thought, the rest of the tribe thought also. So
they rose up by clans and villages and followed after the Sign. That was
how we came to the Squidgy Islands. There were willows there and young
alders and bare knuckles of rock holding up the land.