Chapter 3

"'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.

"Beyond that the Swamp began; the water gathered itself into bayous that went slinking, wolflike, between the trees, or rose like a wolf through the earth and stole it from under your very foot. It doubled into black lagoons to doze, and young snakes coiled on the lily-pads, so that when the sun warmed them you could hear the shi-shisi-ss like a wind rising. Also by night there would be greenish lights that followed the trails for a while and went out suddenly in whistling noises. Now and then in broad day the Swamp would fall asleep. There would be the plop of turtles falling into the creek and the slither of alligators in the mud, and all of a sudden not a ripple would start, and between the clacking of one reed and another would come the soundless lift and stir of the Swamp snoring. Then the hair on your neck would rise, and some man caught walking alone in it would go screaming mad with fear.

"Six moons we had to stay in that place, for Scrag had hidden the herd so cleverly that it was not until the week-old calves began to squeak for their mothers that we found them. And from the time they were able to run under their mother's bodies, One-Tusk and I kept watch and watch to see that they did not break back to the Squidgy Islands. It was necessary for Taku-Wakin's plan that they should go out on the other side where there was good land between the Swamp and the Sea, not claimed by the Kooskooski. We learned to eat grass that summer and squushy reeds with no strength in them--did I say that all the Grass-Eaters were pot-bellied? Also I had to reason with One-Tusk, who had not loved a man, and found that the Swamp bored him. By this time, too, Scrag knew what we were after; she covered her trail and crossed it as many times as a rabbit. Then, just as we thought we had it, the wolf water came and gnawed the trail in two.

"Taku-Wakin would come to me by the Black Lagoon and tell me how Opata worked to make himself chief of the nine villages. He had his own and Taku-Wakin's, for Taku had never dared to ask it back again, and the chief of the Turtle clan was Opata's man.

"'He tells the people that my Stick will not talk to me any more. But how can it talk, Arrumpa, when you have nothing to tell it?'

"'Patience,' I said. 'If we press the cows too hard they will break back the way they have come, and that will be worse than waiting.'

"'And if I do not get them forward soon,' said Taku-Wakin, 'the people will break back, and my father will be proved a fool. I am too little for this thing, Grandfather,' he would say, leaning against my trunk, and I would take him up and comfort him.

"As for Opata, I used to see him sometimes, dancing alone to increase his magic power,--I speak but as the people of Taku-Wakin spoke,--and once at the edge of the lagoon, catching snakes. Opata had made a noose of hair at the end of a peeled switch, and he would snare them as they darted like streaks through the water. I saw him cast away some that he caught, and others he dropped into a wicker basket, one with a narrow neck such as women used for water. How was I to guess what he wanted with them? But the man smelled of mischief. It lay in the thick air like the smell of the lagoons; by night you could hear it throbbing with the drums that scared away the wandering lights from the nine villages.

"Scrag was beginning to get the cows together again; but by that time the people had made up their minds to stay where they were. They built themselves huts on platforms above the water and caught turtles in the bayous.

"'Opata has called a Council,' Taku told me, 'to say that I must make my Stick talk, or they will know me for a deceiver, a maker of short life for them.'

"'Short life to him,' I said. 'In three nights or four, the Grass-Eaters will be moving.'

"'And my people are fast in the mud,' said Taku-Wakin. 'I am a mud-head myself to think a crooked rod could save them.' He took it from his girdle warped by the wet and the warmth of his body. 'My heart is sick, Arrumpa, and Opata makes them a better chief than I, for I have only tried to find them their sea again. But Opata understands them. This is a foolish tale that will never be finished.'

"He loosed the stick from his hand over the black water like a boy skipping stones, but--this is a marvel--it turned as it flew and came back to Taku-Wakin so that he had to take it in his hand or it would have struck him. He stood looking at it astonished, while the moon came up and made dart-shaped ripples of light behind the swimming snakes in the black water. For he saw that if the Stick would not leave him, neither could he forsake--Is this also known to you?" For he saw the children smiling.

The Indian who leaned against Moke-icha's boulder drew a crooked stick, shaped something like an elbow, from under his blanket. Twice he tossed it lightly and twice it flew over the heads of the circle and back like a homing pigeon as he lightly caught it.

"Boomerangs!" cried the children, delighted.

"We called it the Stick-which-kills-flying," said the Indian, and hid it again under his blanket.

"Taku-Wakin thought it Magic Medicine," said the Mastodon. "It was a Sign to him. Two or three times he threw the stick and always it came back to him. He was very quiet, considering what it might mean, as I took him back between the trees that stood knee-deep in the smelly water. We saw the huts at last, built about in a circle and the sacred fire winking in the middle. I remembered the time I had watched with Taku under the Arch Rock.

"'Give me leave,' I said, 'to walk among the huts, and see what will come of it.'

"Taku-Wakin slapped my trunk.

"'Now by the oath of my people, you shall walk,' he said. 'If the herds begin to move, and if no hurt comes to anybody by it, you shall walk; for as long as they are comfortable, even though the Rod should speak, they would not listen.'

"The very next night Scrag began to move her cows out toward the hard land, and when I had marked her trail for five man journeys, I came back to look for Taku-Wakin. There was a great noise of singing a little back from the huts at the Dancing-Place, and all the drums going, and the smoke that drifted along the trails had the smell of a Big Eating. I stole up in the dark till I could look over the heads of the villagers squatted about the fire. Opata was making a speech to them. He was working himself into a rage over the wickedness of Taku-Wakin. He would strike the earth with his stone-headed spear as he talked, and the tribe would yelp after him like wolves closing in on a buck. If the Talking Stick which had led them there was not a liar, let it talk again and show them the way to their sea. Let it talk! And at last, when they had screeched themselves hoarse, they were quiet long enough to hear it.

"Little and young, Taku-Wakin looked, standing up with his Stick in his hand, and the words coming slowly as if he waited for them to reach him from far off. The Stick was no liar, he said; it was he who had lied to them; he had let them think that this was his father's Stick. It was a new stick much more powerful, as he would yet show them. And who was he to make it talk when it would not? Yet it would talk soon...very soon...he had heard it whispering... Let them not vex the Stick lest it speak strange and unthought-of things...

"Oh, but he was well called 'The Wonderful.' I could see the heads of the tribesmen lifting like wolves taking a new scent, and mothers tighten their clutch on their children. Also I saw Opata. Him I watched, for he smelt of mischief. His water-basket was beside him, and as the people turned from baiting Taku-Wakin to believing him, I saw Opata push the bottle secretly with his spear-butt. It rolled into the cleared space toward Taku-Wakin, and the grass ball which stopped its mouth fell out unnoticed. _But no water came out!_

"Many of the waters of the Swamp were bitter and caused sickness, so it was no new thing for a man to have his own water-bottle at Council. But why should he carry a stopped bottle and no water in it? Thus I watched, while Taku-Wakin played for his life with the people's minds, and Opata watched neither the people nor him, but the unstopped mouth of the water-bottle.

"I looked where Opata looked, for I said to myself, from that point comes the mischief, and looking I saw a streak of silver pour out of the mouth of the bottle and coil and lift and make as a snake will for the nearest shadow. It was the shadow of Taku-Wakin's bare legs. Then I knew why Opata smelled of mischief when he had caught snakes in the lagoon. But I was afraid to speak, for I saw that if Taku moved the snake would strike, and there is no cure for the bite of the snake called Silver Moccasin.

"Everybody's eyes were on the rod but mine and Opata's, and as I saw Taku straighten to throw, I lifted my voice in the dark and trumpeted, 'Snake! Snake!' Taku leaped, but he knew my voice and he was not so frightened as the rest of them, who began falling on their faces. Taku leaped as the Silver Moccasin lifted to strike, and the stick as it flew out of his hand, low down like a skimming bird, came back in a circle--he must have practiced many times with it--and dropped the snake with its back broken. The people put their hands over their mouths. They had not seen the snake at all, but a stick that came back to the thrower's hand was magic. They waited to see what Opata would do about it.

"Opata stood up. He was a brave man, I think, for the Stick was Magic to him, also, and yet he stood out against it. Black Magic he said it was, and no wonder it had not led them out of the Swamp, since it was a false stick and Taku-Wakin a Two-Talker. Taku-Wakin could no more lead them out of the Swamp than his stick would leave him. Like it, they would be thrown and come back to the hand of Taku-Wakin for his own purposes.

"He was a clever man, was Opata. He was a fine tall man, beaked like an eagle, and as he moved about in the clear space by the fire, making a pantomime of all he said, as their way is in speech-making, he began to take hold on the minds of the people. Taku-Wakin watched sidewise; he saw the snake writhing on the ground and the unstopped water-bottle with the ground dry under it. I think he suspected. I saw a little ripple go over his naked body as if a thought had struck him. He stepped aside once, and as Opata came at him, threatening and accusing, he changed his place again, ever so slightly. The people yelped as they thought they saw Taku fall back before him. Opata was shaking his spear, and I began to wonder if I had not waited too long to come to Taku-Wakin's rescue, when suddenly Opata stopped still in his tracks and shuddered. He went gray in the fire-light, and--he was a brave man who knew his death when he had met it--from beside his foot he lifted up the broken-backed snake on his spear-point. Even as he held it up for all of them to see, his limbs began to jerk and stiffen.

"I went back to look for One-Tusk. The end of those who are bitten by the moccasin is not pretty to see, and besides, I had business. One-Tusk and I walked through all nine villages...and when we had come out on the other side there were not two sticks of them laid together. Then the people came and looked and were afraid, and Taku-Wakin came and made a sound as when a man drops a ripe paw-paw on the ground. 'Pr-r-utt!' he said, as though it were no more matter than that. 'Now we shall have the less to carry.' But the mother of Taku-Wakin made a terrible outcry. In the place where her hut had been she had found the Talking Stick of Taku's father, trampled to splinters.

"She had had it all the time hidden in her bundle. Long-Hand had told her it was Magic Medicine and she must never let any one have it. _She_ thought it was the only thing that had kept her and her children safe on this journey. But Taku told them that it was his father's Rod which had bewitched them and kept them from going any farther because it had come to the end of its knowledge. Now they would be free to follow his own Stick, which was so much wiser. So he caught their minds as he had caught the Stick, swinging back from disaster. For this is the way with men, if they have reason which suits them they do not care whether it is reasonable or not. It was sufficient for them, one crooked stick being broken, that they should rise up with a shout and follow another."

Arrumpa was silent so long that the children fidgeted.

"But it couldn't have been just as easy as that," Dorcas insisted. "And what did they do when they got to the sea finally?"

"They complained of the fishy taste of everything," said Arrumpa; "also they suffered on the way for lack of food, and Apunkewis was eaten by an alligator. Then they were afraid again when they came to the place beyond the Swamp where the water went to and fro as the sea pushed it, until some of the old men remembered they had heard it was the sea's custom. Twice daily the water came in as if to feed on the marsh grass. Great clouds of gulls flew inland, screaming down the wind, and across the salt flats they had their first sight of the low, hard land.

"We lost them there, for we could not eat the salt grass, and Scrag had turned north by a mud slough where the waters were bitter, and red moss grew on the roots of the willows. We ate for a quarter of the moon's course before we went back around the hard land to see what had become of Taku-Wakin. We fed as far as there was any browse between the sea and the marsh, and at last we saw them come, across the salt pastures. They were sleek as otters with the black slime of the sloughs, and there was not a garment left on them which had not become water-soaked and useless. Some of the women had made slips of sea-birds' skins and nets of marsh grass for carrying their young. It was only by these things that you could tell that they were Man. They came out where the hard land thinned to a tusk, thrust far out into the white froth and the thunder. We saw them naked on the rocks, and then with a great shout join hands as they ran all together down the naked sand to worship the sea. But Taku-Wakin walked by himself..."

"And did you stay there with him?" asked Oliver when he saw by the stir in the audience that the story was quite finished.

"We went back that winter--One-Tusk and I; in time they all went," said Arrumpa. "It was too cold by the sea in winter. And the land changed. Even in Taku-Wakin's time it changed greatly. The earth shook and the water ran out of the marsh into the sea again, and there was hard ground most of the way to Two Rivers. Every year the tribes used to go down by it to gather sea food."

The Indians nodded.

"It was so in our time," they said. "There were great heaps of shells by the sea where we came and dried fish and feasted."

"Shell Mounds," said Oliver. "I've heard of those, too. But I never thought they had stories about them."

"There is a story about everything," said the Buffalo Chief; and by this time the children were quite ready to believe him.

V

HOW HOWKAWANDA AND FRIEND-AT-THE-BACK FOUND THE TRAIL TO THE BUFFALO COUNTRY TOLD BY THE COYOTE

"Concerning that Talking Stick of Taku-Wa-kin's,"--said the Coyote, as the company settled back after Arrumpa's story,--"there is a Telling of _my_ people ... not of a Rod, but a Skin, a hide of thy people, Great Chief,"--he bowed to the Bull Buffalo,--"that talked of Tamal-Pyweack and a Dead Man's Journey--" The little beast stood with lifted paw and nose delicately pointed toward the Bighorn's country as it lifted from the prairie, drawing the earth after it in great folds, high crest beyond high crest flung against the sun; light and color like the inside of a shell playing in its snow-filled hollows.

Up sprang every Plainsman, painted shield dropped to the shoulder, right hand lifted, palm outward, and straight as an arrow out of every throat, the "Hey a-hey a-huh!" of the Indian salutation.

"Backbone of the World!" cried the Blackfoot. "Did you come over that, Little Brother?"

"Not I, but my father's father's first father. By the Crooked Horn,"--he indicated a peak like a buffalo horn, and a sag in the crest below it.

"Then that," said Bighorn, dropping with one bound from his aerial lookout, "should be _my_ story, for my people made that trail, and it was long before any other trod in it."

"It was of that first treading that the Skin talked," agreed the Coyote. He looked about the company for permission to begin, and then addressed himself to Arrumpa. "You spoke, Chief Two-Tails, of the 'tame wolves' of Taku-Wakin; _were_ they wolves, or--"

"Very like you, Wolfling, now that I think of it," agreed the Mastodon, "and they were not tame exactly; they ran at the heels of the hunters for what they could pick up, and sometimes they drove up game for him."

"Why should a coyote, who is the least of all wolves, hunt for himself when he can find a man to follow?" said the Blackfoot, who sat smoking a great calumet out of the west corridor. "Man is the wolf's Medicine. In him he hears the voice of the Great Mystery, and becomes a dog, which is great gain to him."

Pleased as if his master had patted him, without any further introduction the Coyote began his story.

"Thus and so thought the First Father of all the Dogs in the year when he was called Friend-at-the-Back, and Pathfinder. That was the time of the Great Hunger, nearly two years after he joined the man pack at Hidden-under-the-Mountain and was still known by his lair name of Younger Brother. He followed a youth who was the quickest afoot and the readiest laugher. He would skulk about the camp at Hidden-under-the-Mountain watching until the hunters went out. Sometimes How-kawanda--that was the young man he followed--would give a coyote cry of warning, and sometimes Younger Brother would trot off in the direction where he knew the game to be, looking back and pointing until the young men caught the idea; after which, when they had killed, the hunters would laugh and throw him pieces of liver.

"The Country of Dry Washes lies between the Cinoave on the south and the People of the Bow who possessed the Salmon Rivers, a great gray land cut across by deep gullies where the wild waters come down from the Wall-of-Shining-Rocks and worry the bone-white boulders. The People of the Dry Washes live meanly, and are meanly spoken of by the People of the Coast who drove them inland from the sea borders. After the Rains, when the quick grass sprang up, vast herds of deer and pronghorn come down from the mountains; and when there were no rains the people ate lizards and roots. In the moon of the Frost-Touching-Mildly clouds came up from the south with a great trampling of thunder, and flung out over the Dry Washes as a man flings his blanket over a maiden. But if the Rains were scant for two or three seasons, then there was Hunger, and the dust devils took the mesas for their dancing-places.

"Now, Man tribe and Wolf tribe are alike in one thing. When there is scarcity the packs increase to make surer of bringing down the quarry, but when the pinch begins they hunt scattering and avoid one another. That was how it happened that the First Father, who was still called Younger Brother, was alone with Howkawanda when he was thrown by a buck at Talking Water in the moon of the Frost-Touching-Mildly. Howkawanda had caught the buck by the antlers in a blind gully at the foot of the Tamal-Pyweack, trying for the throw back and to the left which drops a buck running, with his neck broken. But his feet slipped on the grass which grows sleek with dryness, and by the time the First Father came up the buck had him down, scoring the ground on either side of the man's body with his sharp antlers, lifting and trampling. Younger Brother leaped at the throat. The toss of the antlers to meet the stroke drew the man up standing. Throwing his whole weight to the right he drove home with his hunting-knife and the buck toppled and fell as a tree falls of its own weight in windless weather.

"'Now, for this,' said Howkawanda to my First Father, when they had breathed a little, 'you are become my very brother.' Then he marked the coyote with the blood of his own hurts, as the custom is when men are not born of one mother, and Younger Brother, who had never been touched by a man, trembled. That night, though it made the hair on his neck rise with strangeness, he went into the hut of Howkawanda at Hidden-under-the-Mountain and the villagers wagged their heads over it. 'Hunger must be hard on our trail,' they said, 'when the wolves come to house with us.'

"But Howkawanda only laughed, for that year he had found a maiden who was more than meat to him. He made a flute of four notes which he would play, lying out in the long grass, over and over, until she came out to him. Then they would talk, or the maiden would pull grass and pile it in little heaps while Howkawanda looked at her and the First Father looked at his master, and none of them cared where the Rains were.

"But when no rain fell at all, the camp was moved far up the shrunken creek, and Younger Brother learned to catch grasshoppers, and ate juniper berries, while the men sat about the fire hugging their lean bellies and talking of Dead Man's Journey. This they would do whenever there was a Hunger in the Country of the Dry Washes, and when they were fed they forgot it."

The Coyote interrupted his own story long enough to explain that though there were no buffaloes in the Country of the Dry Washes, on the other side of the Wall-of-Shining-Rocks the land was black with them. "Now and then stray herds broke through by passes far to the north in the Land of the Salmon Rivers, but the people of that country would not let Howkawanda's people hunt them. Every year, when they went up by tribes and villages to the Tamal-Pyweack to gather pine nuts, the People of the Dry Washes looked for a possible trail through the Wall to the Buffalo Country. There was such a trail. Once a man of strange dress and speech had found his way over it, but he was already starved when they picked him up at the place called Trap-of-the-Winds, and died before he could tell anything. The most that was known of this trail at Hidden-under-the-Mountain was that it led through Knife-Cut Canyon; but at the Wind Trap they lost it.