BRIGHT ROBE FINDS HIS ENEMY
Now it happened that Bright Robe, having wandered to the vicinity
of Great Devil’s Lake after months of fruitless searching for
Wise-as-a-she-wolf, saw Run-all-day, in his waving spruce-branches,
flying eastward from the hillside. Of course he thought it was his
rival, Wise-as-a-she-wolf.
“He flies with the feathers, not the moccasins,” he muttered, gazing
after the grotesque and fast-vanishing figure. “Has he not enough magic
to make himself invisible? Or has he forgotten that I have returned to
my country?” he added, viciously.
Knowing that it would be useless for him to try to follow the speeding
figure, even to keep it in sight, he bent his steps toward that part of
the hillside from which he had seen his supposed enemy rise into the
air. After a hard climb through the half-melted drifts, he arrived at
the lodge of Whispering Grass and found the old woman still crouched
by the fire.
“Why have you come back?” she asked, without looking up. “Have you
spilled the medicine?”
“It is not Wise-as-a-she-wolf, to whom you speak,” said the visitor.
“It is Bright Robe.”
She raised her head and stared at him intently. “And does the great
Bright Robe, the defier of the gods, come to poor Whispering Grass for
medicine?” she asked.
“Nay, I want none of your mixtures, old woman,” he replied, slipping
into the lodge. “But I would know where Wise-as-a-she-wolf set out for,
a little while ago.”
The woman smiled secretly, and stirred the pot by the fire. She knew
something of the history of both the magicians.
“If that was Wise-as-a-she-wolf, he goes northward,” she said.
“I saw him flying eastward, old woman,” cried the magician. “It is
breath wasted that is employed in lying to Bright Robe,” he added
sternly.
“Flying?” she queried.
“You need not pretend to doubt it,” answered the man. “He flew like a
hawk--for the red feathers were in his moccasins. And he flew eastward,
across the lake. Had I seen him sooner, an arrow would have caught up
with him, I think.”
“Why did you not fly after him, great chief?” she asked. His face
darkened with anger and his eyes glowed like coals in the dusk of the
wigwam.
“He has both the moccasins of the wind and the red feathers,” he
replied, harshly. “He travels like a bird while I toil along the
ground; and yet, let me but stand within fifty strides of him and I
shall crush him as a child crushes a nut,” he added, furiously.
“Is not your power great enough to wing your own feet with magic?”
asked Whispering Grass, shrewdly.
Bright Robe stepped forward, overturned the pot of medicine with his
foot, and then hurried from the lodge. He did not take the trouble
to draw his robe above his head and vanish, but stalked across the
clearing, slowly and disdainfully.
Whispering Grass snatched a bow and an arrow from the corner and
hobbled after the magician, muttering between tears and curses. She
caught the gleam of his robe between the dark trees; but, even as
she drew the bow, he turned and saw her. Quick as thought, he pulled
the magic robe high and stepped aside. In the next instant, the arrow
struck the trunk of a fir-tree, and stood quivering in the wood.
“In truth, it was the great magician,” cried the old woman, trembling
with fear, and peering anxiously about. He had vanished quicker than
the shifting of a sunbeam. She knew that her doom was sealed. A hundred
stories of the cruelty of Bright Robe, told to her when she was a
child, awoke in her mind. Not once, during his age-long life, had he
been known to forgive an injury.
Next moment, with awful suddenness the magician reappeared, close
beside her. His face was that of a devil. He let his silver robe fall
from his shoulders and raised his club high.
There sounded a swishing in the air, close above them. Then, with a
fierce, shrill cry, Bright Robe sprang aside, whirling his club around
him so swiftly that it drew gray circles in the sunlight. At the same
moment, he snatched for the silver fur which lay on the ground. Twice
he lifted a corner of it, and twice it was pulled away from him by
some invisible hand. Rage shone in his face like a fire, and horrible
sounds escaped from his lips.
The old woman managed to crawl to the edge of the wood; and there
she crouched, sobbing with terror and yet unable to remove her gaze
from the frantic scene. She realized that the cruel magician had been
attacked by some invisible power even while his club was raised to kill
her and that now he fought a terrific battle, handicapped by not being
able to see his antagonist. Her eyes and brain were keen, but her body
was numb; and so she continued to crouch, with the bow still held in
one withered hand.
At last the robe of white fur skin vanished from the ground. Its
owner dashed here and there in the sunlit clearing, roaring like a
wounded animal and slashing the air with his club. Suddenly he halted,
listening, then, with a shrill scream, he dashed toward the tree in
which stood the arrow Whispering Grass had shot at him. But before he
had crossed half the intervening space, the arrow vanished from the
tree trunk. Turning short, with a movement so powerful and quick as
to seem scarcely human, he sprang toward the old woman. Almost in the
same instant of time the bow was snatched from her hand, apparently
into empty air. At sight of that, Bright Robe threw himself flat on the
sodden snow, his great body shook and dwindled,--and behold, a slim,
white hare darted from the empty clearing into the forest.
An hour passed. The old woman crawled to her wigwam and squatted in the
doorway. Several times she heard a strange noise in the air, as of a
swift small wind. But the tree-tops were not stirred by it. The flames
of the little fire behind her sank and the coals faded to black and
gray. The sun stood midway in the southern sky, and cast a straight
shaft of light through the smoke-hole in the roof of the lodge. But
Whispering Grass gave no heed to either the fire or the sun, but gazed
out, eager yet fearful, for more wonders to be enacted in the quiet
clearing.
The sun slid a hand’s-breadth to the westward and the shaft of light
ran crooked in the dusk of the lodge. A tumult of crashing branches
arose on the upper slopes of the hill and descended toward the
clearing. Out of the shelter broke Bright Robe, now in his human form,
but many times increased in stature, struggling with and clinging to
some unseen body in his arms. His club was gone and blood ran down his
great breast from a gash in the shoulder. He put his gigantic muscles
to every trick of wrestling, showing no fatigue, and yet he was forced
backward and downward, and sometimes swung almost clear of the ground.
Sweat streamed from his great face, and stood like dew on his body,
from which his shirt of dressed leather had been torn.
The desperate battle wrenched and twisted half-way down the clearing.
There, for a dozen seconds, it paused, as if the strength of the
invisible one had slackened. Then, with redoubled violence, Bright
Robe was forced backward again, flung from side to side, battered,
staggered, and overborne. Now his face, for the first time, shone with
the pitiful, inner illumination of fear. He screamed in his anguish
of spirit and bent all his strength to clear himself from the grasp
of the invisible enemy. He hurled his gigantic body this way and
that, dragging backwards and sideways. Half-grown trees were snapped
off by the straining feet of the wrestlers. Blood dyed the trampled
snow,--more blood than that which ran from Bright Robe’s wound. At
last, beyond the fringe of trees at the lower edge of the clearing,
the evil magician fell, crashing, to the ground. A scream of fear and
baffled passion clanged across the wilderness, ringing from wood to
wood and waking terrific echoes against every hillside. For a little
while there continued a sound of gigantic struggling.
Whispering Grass was still squatting on the threshold of her lodge,
when a young man issued from the woods where the fight had so lately
ended, and limped toward her. His clothing of fine white leather, set
out with bright stones, was torn and blood-stained. Blood streamed
down across his face and breast from a gash on his forehead. Even the
moccasins on his feet were torn and dyed with blood. The sight of his
pitiful condition drove the numbness of fear from the old woman and she
hobbled forward and helped him into the lodge and onto her own couch of
spruce-branches and furs.
“I am in sore need of your healing, Whispering Grass,” said the youth,
faintly.
“Lie quiet,” she replied. “In a few days you will be able to tell me
how you came by these grievous hurts.”
But her curiosity pricked her shrewdly to know if this young man had
been mixed in the terrific battle, part of which she had so lately
witnessed. And did he know anything of the Unseen One who had
vanquished Bright Robe? She washed the wounds on the stranger’s head
and breast, and bound them with dried leaves of medicinal virtue. She
gave him a draught that was both vivifying and soothing. He was already
nodding when she removed the torn coverings from his feet, to attend to
the cuts and bruises thereon that puzzled her even more than the hurts
on his body. His eyes flashed open.
“Give me the moccasins,” he cried, eagerly, extending a hand.
“I will make you a new pair,” she said. “These are past mending.”
“Not so,” he replied. “Give them to me, I pray you. Place them under my
head.”
She humoured him, smiling the while at his foolishness. Within a
minute, his eyes were closed in slumber.