of the dark in three bands and split the people's sides with laughter.
They were disguised in black-and-white paint and daubings of mud and
feathers, but there was a Diné among them. By the smell I knew him. He
was a tall man who tumbled well and kept close to Kokomo. But a Diné is
an enemy. Tse-tse-yote had told me. Therefore I kept close at his heels
as they worked around toward the house of Pitahaya, and my neck
bristled. I could see that the Diné had noticed me. He grew a little
frightened, I think, and whipped at me with the whip of feathers which
the Koshare carried to tickle the tribesmen. I laid back my ears--I am
Kabeyde, and it is not for the Diné to flick whips at me. All at once
there rose a shouting for Tse-tse, who came running and beat me over the
head with his bow-case.
"'They will think I set you on to threaten the Koshare because they
mocked me,' he said. 'Have you not done me mischief enough already?'
"That was when we were back in the cave, where he penned me till
morning. There was no way I could tell him that there was a Diné among
the Koshare."
"But I thought--" began Oliver, he looked over to where Arrumpa stood
drawing young boughs of maple through his mouth like a boy stripping
currants. "Couldn't you just have told him?"
"In the old days," said Moke-icha, "men spoke with beasts as brothers.
The Queres had come too far on the Man Trail. I had no words, but I
remembered the trick he had taught me, about what to do when I met a
Diné. I laid back my ears and snarled at him.
"'What!' he said; 'will you make a Diné of _me_?' I saw him frown, and
suddenly he slapped his thigh as a man does when thought overtakes him.
Being but a lad he would not have dared say what he thought, but he took
to spending the night on top of the kiva. I would look out of my cave
and see him there curled up in a corner, or pacing to and fro with the
dew on his blanket and his face turned to the souls of the prayer plumes
drifting in a wide band across the middle heaven.
"I would have been glad to keep him company, but as neither Tse-tse nor
Willow-in-the-Wind paid any attention to me in those days, I decided
that I might as well go with the men and see for myself what lay at the
other end of the Salt Trail.
"I gave them a day's start, so that I might not be turned back; but it
was not necessary, since no man looked back or turned around on that
journey, and no one spoke except those who had been over the trail at
least two times. They ate little,--fine meal of parched corn mixed with
water,--and what was left in the cup was put into the earth for a thank
offering. No one drank except as the leader said they could, and at
night they made prayers and songs.
"The trail leaves the mesa at the Place of the Gap, a dry gully snaking
its way between puma-colored hills and boulders big as kivas. Lasting
Water is at the end of the second day's journey; rainwater that slips
down into a black basin with rock overhanging, cool as an olla. The
rocks in that place when struck give out a pleasant sound. Beyond the
Gap there is white sand in waves like water, wild hills and raw, red
cañons. Around a split rock the trail dips suddenly to Sacred Water,
shallow and white-bordered like a great dead eye."
"I know that place," said the Navajo, "and I think this must be true,
for there is a trail there which bites deep into the granite."
"It was deep and polished even in my day," said Moke-icha, "but that did
not interest me. There was no kill there larger than rabbits, and when I
had seen the men cast prayer plumes on the Sacred Water and begin to
scrape up the salt for their packs, I went back to Ty-uonyi. It was not
until I got back to Lasting Water that I picked up the trail of the
Diné. I followed it half a day before it occurred to me that they were
going to Ty-uonyi. One of the smells--there were three of them--was the
Diné who had come in with the Koshare. I remembered the broken plaster
on the wall and Tse-tse asleep on the housetops. _Then_ I hurried.
"It was blue midnight and the scent fresh on the grass as I came up the
Rito. I heard a dog bark behind the first kiva, and, as I came opposite
Rock-Overhanging, the sound of feet running. I smelled Diné going up the
wall and slipped back in my hurry, but as I came over the roof of the
kiva a tumult broke out in the direction of Pitahaya's house. There was
a scream and a scuffle. I saw Tse-tse running and sent him the puma cry
at which does asleep with their fawns tremble. Down in the long passage
between Pitahaya's court and the gate of Rock-Overhanging, Tse-tse
answered with the hunting-whistle.
"There was a fight going on in the passage. I could feel the cool
draught from the open gate,--they must have opened it from the inside
after scaling the wall by the broken plaster,--and smelled rather than
saw that one man held the passage against Tse-tse. He was armed with a
stone hammer, which is no sort of weapon for a narrow passage. Tse-tse
had caught bow and quiver from the arms that hung always at the inner
entrance of the passage, but made no attempt to draw. He was crouched
against the wall, knife in hand, watching for an opening, when he heard
me padding up behind him in the darkness.
"'Good! Kabeyde,' he cried softly; 'go for him.'
"I sprang straight for the opening I could see behind the Diné, and felt
him go down as I cleared the entrance. Tse-tse panted behind
me,--'Follow, follow!' I could hear the men my cry had waked, pouring
out of the kivas, and knew that the Diné we had knocked over would be
taken care of. We picked up the trail of those who had escaped, straight
across the Rito and over the south wall, but it was an hour before I
realized that they had taken Willow-in-the-Wind with them. Old Pitahaya
was dead without doubt, and the man who had taken Willow-in-the-Wind
was, by the smell, the same that had come in with Kokomo and
the Koshare.
"We were hot on their trail, and by afternoon of the next day I was
certain that they were making for Lasting Water. So I took Tse-tse over
the rim of the Gap by a short cut which I had discovered, which would
drop us back into the trail before they had done drinking. Tse-tse, who
trusted me to keep the scent, was watching ahead for a sight of the
quarry. Thus he saw the Diné before I winded them. I don't know whether
they were just a hunting-party, or friends of those we followed. We
dropped behind a boulder and Tse-tse counted while I lifted every scent.
"'Five,' he said, 'and the Finisher of the Paths of Our Lives knows how
many more between us and Lasting Water!'
"We did not know yet whether they had seen us, but as we began to move
again cautiously, a fox barked in the scrub that was not a fox. Off to
our left another answered him. So now we were no longer hunters,
but hunted.
"Tse-tse slipped his tunic down to his middle and, unbinding his queue,
wound his long hair about his head to make himself look as much like a
Diné as possible. I could see thought rippling in him as he worked, like
wind on water. We began to snake between the cactus and the black rock
toward the place where the fox had last barked."
"But _toward_ them---" Oliver began.
"They were between us and Lasting Water,"--Moke-icha looked about the
listening circle and the Indians nodded, agreeing. "When a fox barked
again, Tse-tse answered with the impudent folly of a young kit talking
back to his betters. Evidently the man on our left was fooled by it, for
he sheered off, but within a bowshot they began to close on us again.
"We had come to a thicket of mesquite from which a man might slip
unnoticed to the head of the gully, provided no one watched that
particular spot too steadily. There we lay among the thorns and the
shadows were long in the low sun. Close on our right a twig snapped and
I began to gather myself for the spring. The ground sloped a little
before us and gave the advantage. The hand of Tse-tse-yote came along
the back of my neck and rested there. 'If a puma lay up here during the
sun,' he whispered, 'this is the hour he would go forth to his hunting.
He would go stretching himself after sleep and having no fear of man,
for where Kabeyde lies up, who expects to find man also.' His hand came
under my chin as his custom was in giving orders. This was how I
understood it; this I did--"
The great cat bounded lightly to the ground, took two or three stretchy
steps, shaking the sleep from her flanks, yawned prodigiously, and
trotted off toward a thicket of wild plums into which she slipped like a
beam of yellow light into water. A moment later she reappeared on the
opposite side, bounded back and settled herself on the boulder. Around
the circle ran the short "Huh! Huh!" of Indian approval. The Navajo
shifted his blanket.
"A Diné could have done no more for a friend," he admitted.
"I see," said Oliver. "When the Diné saw you coming out of the mesquite
they would have been perfectly sure there was no man there. But anyway,
they might have taken a shot at you."
"And the twang of the bowstring and the thrashing about of the kill in
the thicket would have told Tse-tse exactly where _they_ were," said the
Navajo. "The Diné when they hunt man do not turn aside for a puma."
"The hardest part of it all," said Moke-icha, "was to keep from showing
I winded him. I heard the Diné move off, fox-calling to one another, and
at last I smelled Tse-tse working down the gully. He paid no attention
to me whatever; his eyes were fixed on the Diné who stood by the spring
with his back to him looking down on the turkey girl who was huddled
against the rocks with her hands tied behind her. The Diné looked down
with his arms folded, evil-smiling. She looked up and I saw her spit at
him. The man took her by the shoulder, laughing still, and spun her up
standing. Half a bowshot away I heard Tse-tse-yote. 'Down! Down!' he
shouted. The girl dropped like a quail. The Diné, whirling on his heel,
met the arrow with his throat, and pitched choking. I came as fast as I
could between the boulders--I am not built for running--Tse-tse had
unbound the girl's hands and she leaned against him.
"Breathing myself before drinking, I caught a new scent up the Gap where
the wind came from, but before I had placed it there came a little
scrape on the rocks under the roof of Lasting Water, small, like the
rasp of a snake coiling. I had forgot there were three Diné at Ty-uonyi;
the third had been under the rock drinking. He came crawling now with
his knife in his teeth toward Tse-tse. Me he had not seen until he came
round the singing rock, face to face with me...
"When it was over," said Moke-icha, "I climbed up the black roof of
Lasting Water to lick a knife cut in my shoulder. Tse-tse talked to the
girl, of all things, about the love-gift she had put in the cave for me.
'Moke-icha had eaten it before I found her,' he insisted, which was
unnecessary. I lay looking at the Diné I had killed and licking my wound
till I heard, around the bend of the Gap, the travel song of the Queres.
"It was the Salt Pack coming back, every man with his load on his
shoulders. They put their hands in their mouths when they saw Tse-tse.
There was talk; Willow-in-the-Wind told them something. Tse-tse turned
the man he had shot face upward. There was black-and-white paint on his
body; the stripes of the Koshare do not come off easily. I saw Tse-tse
look from the man to Kokomo and the face of the Koshare turned grayish.
I had lived with man, and man-thoughts came to me. I had tasted blood of
my master's enemies; also Kokomo was afraid, and that is an offense to
me. I dropped from where I lay ... I had come to my full weight ... I
think his back was broken.
"It is the Way Things Are," said Moke-icha. "Kokomo had let in the Diné
to kill Pitahaya to make himself chief, and he would have killed Tse-tse
for finding out about it. That I saw and smelled in him. But I did not
wait this time to be beaten with my master's bow-case. I went back to
Shut Cañon, for now that I had killed one of them, it was not good for
me to live with the Queres. Nevertheless, in the rocks above Ty-uonyi
you can still see the image they made of me."
VIII
YOUNG-MAN-WHO-NEVER-TURNS-BACK: A TELLING OF THE TALLEGEWI, BY ONE OF
THEM
It could only have been for a few moments at the end of Moke-icha's
story, before the cliff picture split like a thin film before the
dancing circles of the watchmen's lanterns, and curled into the shadows
between the cases. A thousand echoes broke out in the empty halls and
muffled the voices as the rings of light withdrew down the long gallery
in glimmering reflections. When they passed to the floor below a very
remarkable change had come over the landscape.
The Buffalo Chief and Moke-icha had disappeared. A little way ahead the
trail plunged down the leafy tunnel of an ancient wood, along which the
children saw the great elk trotting leisurely with his cows behind him,
flattening his antlers over his back out of the way of the low-branching
maples. The switching of the brush against the elk's dun sides startled
the little black bear, who was still riffling his bee tree. The children
watched him rise inquiringly to his haunches before he scrambled down
the trail out of sight.
"Lots of those fellows about in my day," said the Mound-Builder. "We
used to go for them in the fall when they grew fat on the dropping nuts
and acorns. Elk, too. I remember a ten-pronged buck that I shot one
winter on the Elk's-Eye River..."
"The Muskingum!" exclaimed an Iroquois, who had listened in silence to
the puma's story. "Did you call it that too? Elk's-Eye! Clear brown and
smooth-flowing. That's the Scioto Trail, isn't it?" he asked of the
Mound-Builder.
"You could call it that. There was a cut-off at Beaver Dam to Flint
Ridge and the crossing of the Muskingum, and another that led to the
mouth of the Kanawha where it meets the River of White-Flashing."
"He means the Ohio," explained the Iroquois to the children. "At flood
the whole surface of the river would run to white riffles like the flash
of a water-bird's wings. But the French called it La Belle Rivière. I'm
an Onondaga myself," he added, "and in my time the Five Nations held all
the territory, after we had driven out the Talle-gewi, between the Lakes
and the O-hey-yo." He stretched the word out, giving it a little
different turn. "Indians' names talk little," he laughed, "but they
say much."
"Like the trails," agreed the Mound-Builder, who was one of the
Tallegewi himself, "every word is the expression of a need. We had a
trade route over this one for copper which we fetched from the Land of
the Sky-Blue Water and exchanged for sea-shells out of the south. At the
mouth of the Scioto it connected with the Kaskaskia Trace to the
Missi-Sippu, where we went once a year to shoot buffaloes on
the plains."
"When the Five Nations possessed the country, the buffaloes came to us,"
said the Onondaga.
"Then the Long Knives came on the sea in the East and there was neither
buffaloes nor Mengwe," answered the Mound-Builder, who did not like
these interruptions. He went on describing the Kaskaskia Trail. "It led
along the highlands around the upper waters of the Miami and the drowned
lands of the Wabash. It was a wonderful trip in the month of the Moon
Halting, when there was a sound of dropping nuts and the woods were all
one red and yellow rain. But in summer...I should know," said the
Mound-Builder; "I carried a pipe as far as Little Miami once..."
He broke off as though the recollection was not altogether a happy one
and began to walk away from the wood, along the trail, which broadened
quickly to a graded way, and led up the slope of a high green mound.
The children followed him without a word. They understood that they had
come to the place in the Story of the Trails, which is known in the
schoolbooks as "History." From the top of the mound they could see
strange shapes of earthworks stretching between them and the shore of
Erie. Lakeward the sand and the standing grass was the pale color of the
moon that floated above it in the midday sky. Between them the blue of
the lake melted into the blue horizon; the turf over the mounds was
thick and wilted.
"I suppose I must remember it like this," said the Tallega, "because
this is the way I saw it when I came back, an old man, after the fall of
Cahokia. But when this mound was built there were towns here, busy and
crowded. The forest came close up on one side, and along the lake front,
field touched field for a day's journey. My town was the middle one of
three of the Eagle Clan. Our Town House stood here, on the top of this
mound, and on that other, the tallest, stood the god-house, with the
Sacred Fire, and the four old men watchers to keep it burning."
"I thought," said Oliver, trying to remember what he had read about it,
"that the mounds were for burials. People dig into them, you know."
"They might think that," agreed the Tallega, "if all they know comes
from what they find by digging. They were for every purpose that
buildings are used for, but we always thought it a good omen if we could
start a Town Mound with the bones of some one we had loved and
respected. First, we laid a circle of stones and an altar with a burnt
offering, then the bones of the chief, or some of our heroes who were
killed in battle. Then the women brought earth in baskets. And if a
chief had served us well, we sometimes buried him on top and raised the
mound higher over him, and the mound would be known by his name until
another chief arose who surpassed him.
"Then there were earthworks for forts and signal stations. You'll find
those on the high places overlooking the principal trails; there were
always heaps of wood piled up for smoke signals. The circles were for
meeting-places and for games."
"What sort of games?" demanded Oliver.
"Ball-play and races; all that sort of thing. There was a game we played
with racquets between goals. Village played against village. The people
would sit on the earthworks and clap and shout when the game pleased
them, and gambled everything they had on their home-town players.
"I suppose," he added, looking around on the green tumuli, "I remember
it like this, because when I lived here I was so full of what was going
on that I had no time for noticing how it looked to me."
"What did go on?" both the children wished immediately to know.
"Something different every time the moon changed. Ice-fishing,
corn-husking. We did everything together; that was what made it so
interesting. The men let us go to the fur traps to carry home the pelts,
and we hung up the birch-bark buckets for our mothers at the
sugar-boiling. Maple sugar, you know. Then we would persuade them to
ladle out a little of the boiling sap into plates that we patted out of
the snow, which could always be found lingering in the hollows, at
sugar-makings. When it was still waxy and warm, we rolled up the cooled
syrup and ate it out of hand.
"In summer whole families would go to the bottom lands paw-paw
gathering. Winter nights there was story-telling in the huts. We had a
kind of corn, very small, that burst out white like a flower when it was
parched..."
"Pop-corn!" cried both the children at once. It seemed strange that
anything they liked so much should have belonged to the Mound-Builders.
"Why, that was what _we_ called it!" he agreed, smiling. "Our mothers
used to stir it in the pot with pounded hickory nuts and bears' grease.
Good eating! And the trading trips! Some of our men used to go as far as
Little River for chert which they liked better for arrow-points than our
own flints, being less brittle and more easily worked. That was a canoe
trip, down the Scioto, down the O-hey-yo, up the Little Tenasa as far as
Little River. There was adventure enough to please everybody.
"That bird-shaped mound," he pointed, "was built the time we won the
Eagle-Dancing against all the other villages."
The Mound-Builder drew out from under his feather robe a gorget of pearl
shell, beautifully engraved with the figure of a young man dancing in an
eagle-beaked mask, with eagles' wings fastened to his shoulders.
"Most of the effigy mounds," he said, taking the gorget from his neck to
let the children examine it, "were built that way to celebrate a treaty
or a victory. Sometimes," he added, after a pause, looking off across
the wide flat mounds between the two taller ones, "they were built like
these, to celebrate a defeat. It was there we buried the Tallegewi who
fell in our first battle with the Lenni-Lenape."
"Were they Mound-Builders, too?" the children asked respectfully, for
though the man's voice was sad, it was not as though he spoke of
an enemy.
"People of the North," he said, "hunting-people, good foes and good
fighters. But afterward, they joined with the Mengwe and drove us from
the country. _That_ was a Mingo,"--he pointed to the Iroquois who had
called himself an Onondaga, disappearing down the forest tunnel. They
saw him a moment, with arrow laid to bow, the sunlight making tawny
splotches on his dark body, as on the trunk of a pine tree, and then
they lost him.
"We were planters and builders," said the Tallega, "and they were
fighters, so they took our lands from us. But look, now, how time
changes all. Of the Lenni-Lenape and the Mengwe there is only a name,
and the mounds are still standing."
"You said," Oliver hinted, "that you carried a pipe once. Was
that--anything particular?"
"It might be peace or war," said the Mound-Builder. "In my case it was
an order for Council, from which war came, bloody and terrible. A
Pipe-Bearer's life was always safe where he was recognized, though when
there is war one is very likely to let fly an arrow at anything moving
in the trails. That reminds me..." The Tallega put back his feathered
robe carefully as he leaned upon his elbow, and the children snuggled
into a little depression at the top of the mound where the fire-hole had
been, to listen.
"There was a boy in our town," he began, "who was the captain of all our
plays from the time we first stole melons and roasting-ears from the
town gardens. He got us into no end of trouble, but no matter what came
of it, we always stood up for him before the elders. There was nothing
_they_ could say which seemed half so important to us as praise or blame
from Ongyatasse. I don't know why, unless it was because he could
out-run and out-wrestle the best of us; and yet he was never pleased
with himself unless the rest of us were satisfied to have it that way.
"Ongyatasse was what his mother called him. It means something very
pretty about the colored light of evening, but the name that he earned
for himself, when he was old enough to be Name-Seeking, was
Young-Man-Who-Never-Turns-Back.
"He was the arrow laid to the bow, and he could no more take himself
back from the adventure he had begun than the shaft can come back to the
bowstring.
"Before we were old enough to go up to the god-house and hear the sacred
Tellings, he had half the boys in our village bound to him in an
unbreakable vow never to turn back from anything we had started. It got
us into a great many difficulties, some of which were ridiculous, but it
had its advantages. The time we chased a young elk we had raised, across
the squash and bean vines of Three Towns, we escaped punishment on the
ground of our vow. Any Tallega parent would think a long time before he
expected his son to break a promise."
Oliver kept to the main point of interest. "Did you get the elk?"
"_Of course_. You see we were never allowed to carry a man's hunting
outfit until we had run down some big game, and brought it in alive to
prove ourselves proper sportsmen. So partly for that and partly because
Ongyatasse always knew the right words to say to everybody, we were
forgiven the damage to the gardens.
"That was the year the Lenni-Lenape came to the Grand Council, which was
held here at Sandusky, asking permission to cross our territory toward
the Sea on the East. They came out of Shinaki, the Fir-Land, as far as
Namae-Sippu, and stood crowded between the lakes north of the river. For
the last year or two, hunting-parties of theirs had been warned back
from trespass, but this was the first time we youngsters had seen
anything of them.
"They were fine-looking fellows, fierce, and tall appearing, with their
hair cropped up about their ears, and a long hanging scalp-lock tied
with eagle feathers. At the same time they seemed savage to us, for they
wore no clothing but twisty skins about their middles, ankle-cut
moccasins, and the Peace Mark on their foreheads.
"Because of the Mark they bore no weapons but the short hunting-bow and
wolfskin quivers, with the tails hanging down, and painted breastbands.
They were chiefs, by their way of walking, and one of them had brought
his son with him. He was about Ongyatasse's age, as handsome as a young
fir. Probably he had a name in his own tongue, but we called him White
Quiver. Few of us had won ours yet, and his was man's size, of white
deerskin and colored quill-work.