rolled out over the open country, clear as a bugle blast, yet hideous
in their discordance. But this morning Tappan did not awaken.
THE GREAT SLAVE
THE GREAT SLAVE
A voice on the wind whispered to Siena the prophecy of his birth. “A
chief is born to save the vanishing tribe of Crows! A hunter to his
starving people!” While he listened, at his feet swept swift waters,
the rushing, green-white, thundering Athabasca, spirit-forsaken river;
and it rumbled his name and murmured his fate. “Siena! Siena! His bride
will rise from a wind kiss on the flowers in the moonlight! A new land
calls to the last of the Crows! Northward where the wild goose ends its
flight Siena will father a great people!”
So Siena, a hunter of the leafy trails, dreamed his dreams; and at
sixteen he was the hope of the remnant of a once powerful tribe, a
stripling chief, beautiful as a bronzed autumn god, silent, proud,
forever listening to voices on the wind.
To Siena the lore of the woodland came as flight comes to the
strong-winged wild fowl. The secrets of the forests were his, and of
the rocks and rivers.
He knew how to find the nests of the plover, to call the loon, to net
the heron, and spear the fish. He understood the language of the
whispering pines. Where the deer came down to drink and the caribou
browsed on moss and the white rabbit nibbled in the grass and the bear
dug in the logs for grubs--all these he learned; and also when the
black flies drove the moose into the water and when the honk of the
geese meant the approach of the north wind.
He lived in the woods, with his bow, his net, and his spear. The trees
were his brothers. The loon laughed for his happiness, the wolf mourned
for his sadness. The bold crag above the river, Old Stoneface, heard
his step when he climbed there in the twilight. He communed with the
stern god of his ancestors and watched the flashing Northern Lights and
listened.
From all four corners came his spirit guides with steps of destiny
on his trail. On all the four winds breathed voices whispering of
his future; loudest of all called the Athabasca, god-forsaken river,
murmuring of the bride born of a wind kiss on the flowers in the
moonlight.
It was autumn, with the flame of leaf fading, the haze rolling out of
the hollows, the lull yielding to moan of coming wind. All the signs
of a severe winter were in the hulls of the nuts, in the fur of the
foxes, in the flight of water-fowl. Siena was spearing fish for winter
store. None so keen of sight as Siena, so swift of arm; and as he was
the hope, so he alone was the provider for the starving tribe.
Siena stood to his knees in a brook where it flowed over its gravelly
bed into the Athabasca. Poised high was his wooden spear. It glinted
downward swift as a shaft of sunlight through the leaves. Then Siena
lifted a quivering whitefish and tossed it upon the bank where his
mother Ema, with other women of the tribe, sun-dried the fish upon a
rock.
[Illustration: ON ALL THE FOUR WINDS BREATHED VOICES WHISPERING OF HIS
FUTURE]
Again and again, many times, flashed the spear. The young chief seldom
missed his aim. Early frosts on the uplands had driven the fish down to
deeper water, and as they came darting over the bright pebbles Siena
called them by name.
The oldest squaw could not remember such a run of fish. Ema sang the
praises of her son; the other women ceased the hunger chant of the
tribe.
Suddenly a hoarse shout pealed out over the waters.
Ema fell in a fright; her companions ran away; Siena leaped upon the
bank, clutching his spear. A boat in which were men with white faces
drifted down toward him.
“Hal-loa!” again sounded the hoarse cry.
Ema cowered in the grass. Siena saw a waving of white hands; his knees
knocked together and he felt himself about to flee. But Siena of the
Crows, the savior of a vanishing tribe, must not fly from visible foes.
“Palefaces,” he whispered, trembling, yet stood his ground ready to
fight for his mother. He remembered stories of an old Indian who had
journeyed far to the south and had crossed the trails of the dreaded
white men. There stirred in him vague memories of strange Indian
runners telling camp-fire tales of white hunters with weapons of
lightning and thunder.
“Naza! Naza!” Siena cast one fleeting glance to the north and a prayer
to his god of gods. He believed his spirit would soon be wandering in
the shades of the other Indian world.
* * * * *
As the boat beached on the sand Siena saw men lying with pale faces
upward to the sky, and voices in an unknown tongue greeted him. The
tone was friendly, and he lowered his threatening spear. Then a man
came up the bank, his hungry eyes on the pile of fish, and he began to
speak haltingly in mingled Cree and Chippewayan language:
“Boy--we’re white friends--starving--let us buy fish--trade for
fish--we’re starving and we have many moons to travel.”
“Siena’s tribe is poor,” replied the lad; “sometimes they starve too.
But Siena will divide his fish and wants no trade.”
His mother, seeing the white men intended no evil, came out of her
fright and complained bitterly to Siena of his liberality. She spoke
of the menacing winter, of the frozen streams, the snow-bound forest,
the long night of hunger. Siena silenced her and waved the frightened
braves and squaws back to their wigwams.
“Siena is young,” he said simply; “but he is chief here. If we
starve--we starve.”
Whereupon he portioned out a half of the fish. The white men built a
fire and sat around it feasting like famished wolves around a fallen
stag. When they had appeased their hunger they packed the remaining
fish in the boat, whistling and singing the while. Then the leader made
offer to pay, which Siena refused, though the covetous light in his
mother’s eyes hurt him sorely.
“Chief,” said the leader, “the white man understands; now he offers
presents as one chief to another.”
Thereupon he proffered bright beads and tinseled trinkets, yards of
calico and strips of cloth. Siena accepted with a dignity in marked
contrast to the way in which the greedy Ema pounced upon the glittering
heap. Next the paleface presented a knife which, drawn from its
scabbard, showed a blade that mirrored its brightness in Siena’s eyes.
“Chief, your woman complains of a starving tribe,” went on the white
man. “Are there not many moose and reindeer?”
“Yes. But seldom can Siena creep within range of his arrow.”
“A-ha! Siena will starve no more,” replied the man, and from the boat
he took a long iron tube with a wooden stock.
“What is that?” asked Siena.
“The wonderful shooting stick. Here, boy, watch! See the bark on the
camp fire. Watch!”
He raised the stick to his shoulder. Then followed a streak of flame,
a puff of smoke, a booming report; and the bark of the camp fire flew
into bits.
The children dodged into the wigwams with loud cries, the women ran
screaming, Ema dropped in the grass wailing that the end of the world
had come, while Siena, unable to move hand or foot, breathed another
prayer to Naza of the northland.
The white man laughed and, patting Siena’s arm, he said: “No fear.”
Then he drew Siena away from the bank, and began to explain the meaning
and use of the wonderful shooting stick. He reloaded it and fired
again and yet again, until Siena understood and was all aflame at the
possibilities of such a weapon.
Patiently the white man taught the Indian how to load it, sight, and
shoot, and how to clean it with ramrod and buckskin. Next he placed at
Siena’s feet a keg of powder, a bag of lead bullets, and boxes full of
caps. Then he bade Siena farewell, entered the boat with his men and
drifted round a bend of the swift Athabasca.
Siena stood alone upon the bank, the wonderful shooting stick in his
hands, and the wail of his frightened mother in his ears. He comforted
her, telling her the white men were gone, that he was safe, and that
the prophecy of his birth had at last begun its fulfillment. He carried
the precious ammunition to a safe hiding place in a hollow log near his
wigwam and then he plunged into the forest.
Siena bent his course toward the runways of the moose. He walked in a
kind of dream, for he both feared and believed. Soon the glimmer of
water, splashes and widening ripples, caused him to crawl stealthily
through the ferns and grasses to the border of a pond. The familiar hum
of flies told him of the location of his quarry. The moose had taken to
the water, driven by the swarms of black flies, and were standing neck
deep, lifting their muzzles to feed on the drooping poplar branches.
Their wide-spreading antlers, tipped back into the water, made the
ripples.
Trembling as never before, Siena sank behind a log. He was within
fifty paces of the moose. How often in that very spot had he strung
a feathered arrow and shot it vainly! But now he had the white man’s
weapon, charged with lightning and thunder. Just then the poplars
parted above the shore, disclosing a bull in the act of stepping
down. He tossed his antlered head at the cloud of humming flies, then
stopped, lifting his nose to scent the wind.
“Naza!” whispered Siena in his swelling throat.
He rested the shooting stick on the log and tried to see over the brown
barrel. But his eyes were dim. Again he whispered a prayer to Naza. His
sight cleared, his shaking arms stilled, and with his soul waiting,
hoping, doubting, he aimed and pulled the trigger.
Boom!
High the moose flung his ponderous head, to crash down upon his knees,
to roll in the water and churn a bloody foam, and then lie still.
“Siena! Siena!”
Shrill the young chief’s exultant yell pealed over the listening
waters, piercing the still forest, to ring back in echo from Old
Stoneface. It was Siena’s triumphant call to his forefathers, watching
him from the silence.
The herd of moose plowed out of the pond and crashed into the woods,
where, long after they had disappeared, their antlers could be heard
cracking the saplings.
* * * * *
When Siena stood over the dead moose his doubts fled; he was indeed
god-chosen. No longer chief of a starving tribe! Reverently and with
immutable promise he raised the shooting stick to the north, toward
Naza who had remembered him; and on the south, where dwelt the enemies
of his tribe, his dark glance brooded wild and proud and savage.
Eight times the shooting stick boomed out in the stillness and eight
moose lay dead in the wet grasses. In the twilight Siena wended his way
home and placed eight moose tongues before the whimpering squaws.
“Siena is no longer a boy,” he said. “Siena is a hunter. Let his women
go bring in the meat.”
Then to the rejoicing and feasting and dancing of his tribe he turned
a deaf ear, and in the night passed alone under the shadow of Old
Stoneface, where he walked with the spirits of his ancestors and
believed the voices on the wind.
Before the ice locked the ponds Siena killed a hundred moose and
reindeer. Meat and fat and oil and robes changed the world for the Crow
tribe.
Fires burned brightly all the long winter; the braves awoke from their
stupor and chanted no more; the women sang of the Siena who had come,
and prayed for summer wind and moonlight to bring his bride.
Spring went by, summer grew into blazing autumn, and Siena’s fame and
the wonder of the shooting stick spread through the length and breadth
of the land.
Another year passed, then another, and Siena was the great chief of the
rejuvenated Crows. He had grown into a warrior’s stature, his face had
the beauty of the god-chosen, his eye the falcon flash of the Sienas of
old. Long communion in the shadow of Old Stoneface had added wisdom to
his other gifts; and now to his worshiping tribe all that was needed to
complete the prophecy of his birth was the coming of the alien bride.
* * * * *
It was another autumn, with the wind whipping the tamaracks and moaning
in the pines, and Siena stole along a brown, fern-lined trail. The dry
smell of fallen leaves filled his nostrils; he tasted snow in the keen
breezes. The flowers were dead, and still no dark-eyed bride sat in his
wigwam. Siena sorrowed and strengthened his heart to wait. He saw her
flitting in the shadows around him, a wraith with dusky eyes veiled by
dusky wind-blown hair, and ever she hovered near him, whispering from
every dark pine, from every waving tuft of grass.
To her whispers he replied: “Siena waits.”
He wondered of what alien tribe she would come. He hoped not of the
unfriendly Chippewayans or the far-distant Blackfeet; surely not of
the hostile Crees, life enemies of his tribe, destroyers of its once
puissant strength, jealous now of its resurging power.
* * * * *
Other shadows flitted through the forest, spirits that rose silently
from the graves over which he trod, and warned him of double steps on
his trail, of unseen foes watching him from the dark coverts. His
braves had repeated gossip, filterings from stray Indian wanderers,
hinting of plots against the risen Siena. To all these he gave no heed,
for was not he Siena, god-chosen, and had he not the wonderful shooting
stick?
It was the season that he loved, when dim forest and hazy fernland
spoke most impellingly. The tamaracks talked to him, the poplars
bowed as he passed, and the pines sang for him alone. The dying vines
twined about his feet and clung to him, and the brown ferns, curling
sadly, waved him a welcome that was a farewell. A bird twittered a
plaintive note and a loon whistled a lonely call. Across the wide gray
hollows and meadows of white moss moaned the north wind, bending all
before it, blowing full into Siena’s face with its bitter promise. The
lichen-covered rocks and the rugged-barked trees and the creatures
that moved among them--the whole world of earth and air heard Siena’s
step on the rustling leaves and a thousand voices hummed in the autumn
stillness.
So he passed through the shadowy forest and over the gray muskeg flats
to his hunting place. With his birch-bark horn he blew the call of the
moose. He alone of hunting Indians had the perfect moose call. There,
hidden within a thicket, he waited, calling and listening till an
angry reply bellowed from the depths of a hollow, and a bull moose,
snorting fight, came cracking the saplings in his rush. When he sprang
fierce and bristling into the glade, Siena killed him. Then, laying his
shooting stick over a log, he drew his knife and approached the beast.
A snapping of twigs alarmed Siena and he whirled upon the defensive,
but too late to save himself. A band of Indians pounced upon him and
bore him to the ground. One wrestling heave Siena made, then he was
overpowered and bound. Looking upward, he knew his captors, though he
had never seen them before; they were the lifelong foes of his people,
the fighting Crees.
A sturdy chief, bronze of face and sinister of eye, looked grimly down
upon his captive. “Baroma makes Siena a slave.”
* * * * *
Siena and his tribe were dragged far southward to the land of the
Crees. The young chief was bound upon a block in the center of the
village where hundreds of Crees spat upon him, beat him, and outraged
him in every way their cunning could devise. Siena’s gaze was on the
north and his face showed no sign that he felt the torments.
At last Baroma’s old advisers stopped the spectacle, saying: “This is a
man!”
Siena and his people became slaves of the Crees. In Baroma’s lodge,
hung upon caribou antlers, was the wonderful shooting stick with
Siena’s powder horn and bullet pouch, objects of intense curiosity and
fear.
None knew the mystery of this lightning-flashing, thunder-dealing
thing; none dared touch it.
The heart of Siena was broken; not for his shattered dreams or the end
of his freedom, but for his people. His fame had been their undoing.
Slaves to the murderers of his forefathers! His spirit darkened, his
soul sickened; no more did sweet voices sing to him on the wind, and
his mind dwelt apart from his body among shadows and dim shapes.
Because of his strength he was worked like a dog at hauling packs and
carrying wood; because of his fame he was set to cleaning fish and
washing vessels with the squaws. Seldom did he get to speak a word to
his mother or any of his people. Always he was driven.
One day, when he lagged almost fainting, a maiden brought him water to
drink. Siena looked up, and all about him suddenly brightened, as when
sunlight bursts from cloud.
“Who is kind to Siena?” he asked, drinking.
“Baroma’s daughter,” replied the maiden.
“What is her name?”
Quickly the maiden bent her head, veiling dusky eyes with dusky hair.
“Emihiyah.”
“Siena has wandered on lonely trails and listened to voices not meant
for other ears. He has heard the music of Emihiyah on the winds. Let
the daughter of Siena’s great foe not fear to tell of her name.”
“Emihiyah means a wind kiss on the flowers in the moonlight,” she
whispered shyly and fled.
Love came to the last of the Sienas and it was like a glory. Death
shuddered no more in Siena’s soul. He saw into the future, and out of
his gloom he rose again, god-chosen in his own sight, with such added
beauty to his stern face and power to his piercing eye and strength to
his lofty frame that the Crees quailed before him and marveled. Once
more sweet voices came to him, and ever on the soft winds were songs of
the dewy moorlands to the northward, songs of the pines and the laugh
of the loon and of the rushing, green-white, thundering Athabasca,
god-forsaken river.
* * * * *
Siena’s people saw him strong and patient, and they toiled on,
unbroken, faithful. While he lived, the pride of Baroma was vaunting.
“Siena waits” were the simple words he said to his mother, and she
repeated them as wisdom. But the flame of his eye was like the leaping
Northern Lights, and it kept alive the fire deep down in their breasts.
In the winter when the Crees lolled in their wigwams, when less labor
fell to Siena, he set traps in the snow trails for silver fox and
marten. No Cree had ever been such a trapper as Siena. In the long
months he captured many furs, with which he wrought a robe the like of
which had not before been the delight of a maiden’s eye. He kept it by
him for seven nights, and always during this time his ear was turned to
the wind. The seventh night was the night of the midwinter feast, and
when the torches burned bright in front of Baroma’s lodge Siena took
the robe and, passing slowly and stately till he stood before Emihiyah,
he laid it at her feet.
Emihiyah’s dusky face paled, her eyes that shone like stars drooped
behind her flying hair, and all her slender body trembled.
“Slave!” cried Baroma, leaping erect. “Come closer that Baroma may see
what kind of a dog approaches Emihiyah.”
Siena met Baroma’s gaze, but spoke no word. His gift spoke for him. The
hated slave had dared to ask in marriage the hand of the proud Baroma’s
daughter. Siena towered in the firelight with something in his presence
that for a moment awed beholders. Then the passionate and untried
braves broke the silence with a clamor of the wolf pack.
Tillimanqua, wild son of Baroma, strung an arrow to his bow and shot it
into Siena’s hip, where it stuck, with feathered shaft quivering.
The spring of the panther was not swifter than Siena; he tossed
Tillimanqua into the air and, flinging him down, trod on his neck and
wrenched the bow away. Siena pealed out the long-drawn war whoop of his
tribe that had not been heard for a hundred years, and the terrible cry
stiffened the Crees in their tracks.
Then he plucked the arrow from his hip and, fitting it to the string,
pointed the gory flint head at Tillimanqua’s eyes and began to bend
the bow. He bent the tough wood till the ends almost met, a feat of
exceeding great strength, and thus he stood with brawny arms knotted
and stretched.
A scream rent the suspense. Emihiyah fell upon her knees. “Spare
Emihiyah’s brother!”
Siena cast one glance at the kneeling maiden, then, twanging the bow
string, he shot the arrow toward the sky.
“Baroma’s slave is Siena,” he said, with scorn like the lash of a whip.
“Let the Cree learn wisdom.”
Then Siena strode away, with a stream of dark blood down his thigh, and
went to his brush tepee, where he closed his wound.
In the still watches of the night, when the stars blinked through the
leaves and the dew fell, when Siena burned and throbbed in pain, a
shadow passed between his weary eyes and the pale light. And a voice
that was not one of the spirit voices on the wind called softly over
him, “Siena! Emihiyah comes.”
The maiden bound the hot thigh with a soothing balm and bathed his
fevered brow.
Then her hands found his in tender touch, her dark face bent low to
his, her hair lay upon his cheek. “Emihiyah keeps the robe,” she said.
“Siena loves Emihiyah,” he replied.
“Emihiyah loves Siena,” she whispered.
She kissed him and stole away.
On the morrow Siena’s wound was as if it had never been; no eye saw his
pain. Siena returned to his work and his trapping. The winter melted
into spring, spring flowered into summer, summer withered into autumn.
Once in the melancholy days Siena visited Baroma in his wigwam.
“Baroma’s hunters are slow. Siena sees a famine in the land.”
“Let Baroma’s slave keep his place among the squaws,” was the reply.
That autumn the north wind came a moon before the Crees expected it;
the reindeer took their annual march farther south; the moose herded
warily in open groves; the whitefish did not run, and the seven-year
pest depleted the rabbits.
When the first snow fell Baroma called a council and then sent his
hunting braves far and wide.
One by one they straggled back to camp, footsore and hungry, and each
with the same story. It was too late.
A few moose were in the forest, but they were wild and kept far out of
range of the hunter’s arrows, and there was no other game.
A blizzard clapped down upon the camp, and sleet and snow whitened
the forest and filled the trails. Then winter froze everything in icy
clutch. The old year drew to a close.
* * * * *
The Crees were on the brink of famine. All day and all night they kept
up their chanting and incantations and beating of tom-toms to conjure
the return of the reindeer. But no reindeer appeared.
It was then that the stubborn Baroma yielded to his advisers and
consented to let Siena save them from starvation by means of his
wonderful shooting stick. Accordingly Baroma sent word to Siena to
appear at his wigwam.
Siena did not go, and said to the medicine men: “Tell Baroma soon it
will be for Siena to demand.”
Then the Cree chieftain stormed and stamped in his wigwam and swore
away the life of his slave. Yet again the wise medicine men prevailed.
Siena and the wonderful shooting stick would be the salvation of the
Crees. Baroma, muttering deep in his throat like distant thunder, gave
sentence to starve Siena until he volunteered to go forth to hunt, or
let him be the first to die.
The last scraps of meat, except a little hoarded in Baroma’s lodge,
were devoured, and then began the boiling of bones and skins to make a
soup to sustain life. The cold days passed and a silent gloom pervaded
the camp. Sometimes a cry of a bereaved mother, mourning for a starved
child, wailed through the darkness. Siena’s people, long used to
starvation, did not suffer or grow weak so soon as the Crees. They were
of hardier frame, and they were upheld by faith in their chief. When
he would sicken it would be time for them to despair. But Siena walked
erect as in the days of his freedom, nor did he stagger under the loads
of firewood, and there was a light on his face. The Crees, knowing of
Baroma’s order that Siena should be the first to perish of starvation,
gazed at the slave first in awe, then in fear. The last of the Sienas
was succored by the spirits.
But god-chosen though Siena deemed himself, he knew it was not by
the spirits that he was fed in this time of famine. At night in the
dead stillness, when even no mourning of wolf came over the frozen
wilderness, Siena lay in his brush tepee close and warm under his
blanket. The wind was faint and low, yet still it brought the old
familiar voices. And it bore another sound--the soft fall of a moccasin
on the snow. A shadow passed between Siena’s eyes and the pale light.
“Emihiyah comes,” whispered the shadow and knelt over him.
She tendered a slice of meat which she had stolen from Baroma’s scant
hoard as he muttered and growled in uneasy slumber. Every night since
her father’s order to starve Siena, Emihiyah had made this perilous
errand.
And now her hand sought his and her dusky hair swept his brow.
“Emihiyah is faithful,” she breathed low.