Chapter 9

"But as the arrow was not clean, and as the Lenni-Lenape had shot all the deer, if I had not known that Well-Praised had devised both question and answer, it would have seemed all foolishness. There had been no General Council since the one at which the treaty of passage was made with the Lenni-Lenape; therefore I knew that the War-Chief had planned this sending of dark messages in advance, messages which no Young-Man-Who-Never-Turns-Back had any right to understand.

"'But why the Painted Scroll?' I said to Ongyatasse; for if, as I supposed, the real message was in the question and answer, I could not see why there should still be a Council called.

"'The scroll,' said my friend, 'is for those who are meant to be fooled by it.'

"'But who should be fooled?'

"'Whoever should stop us on the trail.'

"'My thoughts do not move so fast as my feet, O my friend,' said I. 'Who would stop a pipe-carrier of the Tallegewi?" "'What if it should be the Horned Heads?' said Ongyatasse.

"That was a name we had given the Lenni-Lenape on account of the feathers they tied to the top of their hair, straight up like horns sprouting. Of course, they could have had no possible excuse for stopping us, being at peace, but I began to put this together with things Ongyatasse had told me, particularly the reason why no older man than he could be spared from Three Towns. He said the men were rebuilding the stockade and getting in the harvest.

"The middle one of Three Towns was walled, a circling wall of earth half man high, and on top of that, a stockade of planted posts and wattles. It was the custom in war-times to bring the women and the corn into the walled towns from the open villages. But there had been peace so long in Tallega that our stockade was in great need of rebuilding, and so were the corn bins. Well-Praised was expecting trouble with the Lenni-Lenape, I concluded; but I did not take it very seriously. The Moon of Stopped Waters was still young in the sky, and the fifth day of the Moon Halting seemed very far away to me.

"We were eleven days in all carrying the Pipe to the Miami villages, and though they fed us well at the towns where we stopped, we were as thin as snipe at the end of it. It was our first important running, you see, and we wished to make a record. We followed the main trails which followed the watersheds. Between these, we plunged down close-leaved, sweating tunnels of underbrush, through tormenting clouds of flies. In the bottoms the slither of our moccasins in the black mud would wake clumps of water snakes, big as a man's head, that knotted themselves together in the sun. There is a certain herb which snakes do not love which we rubbed on our ankles, but we could hear them rustle and hiss as we ran, and the hot air was all a-click and a-glitter with insects' wings; ... also there were trumpet flowers, dusky-throated, that made me think of my girl at Flint Ridge... Then we would come out on long ridges where oak and hickory shouldered one another like the round-backed billows of the lake after the storm. We made our record. And for all that we were not so pressed nor so overcome with the dignity of our errand that we could not spare one afternoon to climb up to the Wabashiki Beacon. It lies on the watershed between the headwaters of the Maumee and the Wabash, a cone-shaped mound and a circling wall within which there was always wood piled for the beacon light, the Great Gleam, the Wabashiki, which could be seen the country round for a two days' journey. The Light-Keeper was very pleased with our company and told us old tales half the night long, about how the Beacon had been built and how it was taken by turns by the Round Heads and the Painted Turtles. He asked us also if we had seen anything of a party of Lenni-Lenape which he had noted the day before, crossing the bottoms about an hour after he had sighted us. He thought they must have gone around by Crow Creek, avoiding the village, and that we should probably come up with them the next morning, which proved to be the case.

"They rose upon us suddenly as we dropped down to the east fork of the Maumee, and asked us rudely where we were going. They had no right, of course, but they were our elders, to whom it is necessary to be respectful, and they were rather terrifying, with their great bows, tall as they were, stark naked except for a strip of deerskin, and their feathers on end like the quills of an angry porcupine. We had no weapons ourselves, except short hunting-bows,--one does not travel with peace on his mouth and a war weapon at his back,--so we answered truly, and Ongyatasse read the scroll to them, which I thought unnecessary.

"'Now, I think,' said my friend, when the Lenape had left us with some question about a hunting-party, which they had evidently invented to excuse their rudeness, 'that it was for such as these that the scroll was written.' But we could not understand why Well-Praised should have gone to all that trouble to let the Lenni-Lenape know that he had called a Council.

"When we had smoked our last pipe, we were still two or three days from Three Towns, and we decided to try for a cut-off by a hunting-trail which Ongyatasse had been over once, years ago, with his father. These hunting-traces go everywhere through the Tallegewi Country. You can tell them by the way they fork from the main trails and, after a day or two, thin into nothing. We traveled well into the night from the place that Ongyatasse remembered, so as to steer by the stars, and awoke to the pleasant pricking of adventure. But we had gone half the morning before we began to be sure that we were followed.

"Jays that squawked and fell silent as we passed, called the alarm again a few minutes later. A porcupine which we saw, asleep upon a log, woke up and came running from behind us. We thought of the Lenni-Lenape. Where a bare surface of rock across our path made it possible to turn out without leaving a track, we stole back a few paces and waited. Presently we made out, through the thick leaves, a youth, about our age we supposed, for his head was not cropped and he was about the height of Ongyatasse. When we had satisfied ourselves that he was alone, we took pleasure in puzzling him. As soon as he missed our tracks in the trail, he knew that he was discovered and played quarry to our fox very craftily. For an hour or two we stalked one another between the buckeye boles, and then I stepped on a rotten log which crumbled and threw me noisily. The Lenape let fly an arrow in our direction. We were nearing a crest of a ridge where the underbrush thinned out, and as soon as we had a glimpse of his naked legs slipping from tree to tree, Ongyatasse made a dash for him. We raced like deer through the still woods, Ongyatasse gaining on the flying figure, and I about four laps behind him. A low branch swished blindingly across my eyes for a moment, and when I could look again, the woods were suddenly still and empty.

"I dropped instantly, for I did not know what this might mean, and creeping cautiously to the spot where I had last seen them, I saw the earth opening in a sharp, deep ravine, at the bottom of which lay Ongyatasse with one leg crumpled under him. I guessed that the Lenape must have led him to the edge and then slipped aside just in time to let the force of Ongyatasse's running carry him over. Without waiting to plan, I began to climb down the steep side of the ravine. About halfway down I was startled by a rustling below, and, creeping along the bottom of the bluff, I saw the Lenni-Lenape with his knife between his teeth, within an arm's length of my friend. I cried out, and in a foolish effort to save him, I must have let go of the ledge to which I clung. The next thing I knew I was lying half-stunned, with a great many pains in different parts of me, at the bottom of the ravine, almost within touch of Ongyatasse and a young Lenape with an amulet of white deer's horn about his neck and, across his back, what had once been a white quiver. He was pouring water from a birch-bark cup upon my friend, and as soon as he saw that my eyes were opened he came and offered me a drink. There did not seem to be anything to say, so we said nothing, but presently, when I could sit up, he washed the cut on the back of my head, and then he showed me that Ongyatasse's knee was out of place, and said that we ought to pull it back before he came to himself.

"I crawled over--I had saved myself by falling squarely on top of White Quiver so that nothing worse happened to me than sore ribs and a finger broken--and took my friend around the body while our enemy pulled the knee, and Ongyatasse groaned aloud and came back. Then White Quiver tied up my finger in a splint of bark, and we endured our pains and said nothing.

"We were both prisoners of the Lenape. So we considered ourselves; we waited to see what he would do about it. Toward evening he went off for an hour and returned with a deer which he dressed very skillfully and gave us to eat. Then, of the wet hide, he made a bandage for Ongyatasse's knee, which shrunk as it dried and kept down the swelling.

"'Now I shall owe you my name as well as my life,' said Ongyatasse, for if his knee had not been properly attended, that would have been the end of his running.

"'Then your new name would be Well-Friended,' said the Lenape, and he made a very good story of how I had come tumbling down on both of them. We laughed, but Ongyatasse had another question.

"'There was peace on my mouth and peace between Lenni-Lenape and Tallegewi. Why should you chase us?'

"'The Tallegewi send a Pipe to the Three Clans. Will you swear that the message that went with it had nothing to do with the Lenni-Lenape?'

"'What should two boys know of a call to Council?' said Ongyatasse, and showed him the birch-bark scroll, to which White Quiver paid no attention.

"'There is peace between us, and a treaty, the terms of which were made by the Tallegewi, all of which we have kept. We have entered no town without invitation. When one of our young men stole a maiden of yours we returned her to her village.' He went on telling many things, new to us, of the highness of the Lenni-Lenape. 'All this was agreed at the Three Towns by Cool Waters,' said he. 'Now comes a new order. We may not enter the towns at all. The treaty was for camping privileges in any one place for the space of one moon. Now, if we are three days in one place, we are told that we must move on. The Lenni-Lenape are not Two-Talkers. If we wear peace on our mouths we wear it in our hearts also.'

"'There is peace between your people and mine, and among the Tallegewi, peace.'

"'So,' said White Quiver. 'Then why do they rebuild their stockades and fetch arrow-stone from far quarries? And why do they call a Council in the Moon of the Harvest?'

"I remembered the good trade my uncle, the arrow-maker, had had that summer, and was amazed at his knowledge of it, so I answered as I had been taught. 'If I were a Lenape,' said I, 'and thought that the Councils of the Tallegewi threatened my people, I would know what those Councils were if I made myself a worm in the roof-tree to overhear it.'

"'Aye,' he said, 'but you are only a Tallega.'

"He was like that with us, proud and humble by turns. Though he was a naked savage, traveling through our land on sufferance, he could make us crawl in our hearts for the Tallegewi. He suspected us of much evil, most of which was true as it turned out; yet all the time we lay at the bottom of the ravine, for the most part helpless, he killed every day for us, and gathered dry grass to make a bed for Ongyatasse.

"We talked no more of the Council or of our errand, but as youths will, we talked of highness, and of big game in Shinaki, and of the ways of the Tallegewi, of which for the most part he was scornful.

"Corn he allowed us as a great advantage, but of our towns he doubted whether they did not make us fat and Two-Talkers.

"'Town is a trade-maker,' he said; 'men who trade much for things, will also trade for honor.'

"'The Lenni-Lenape carry their honor in their hands,' said Ongyatasse, 'but the Tallegewi carry theirs in their forehead.'

"He meant," said the Mound-Builder, turning to the children, "that the Lenni-Lenape fought for what they held most dear, and the Tallegewi schemed and plotted for it. That was as we were taught. With us, the hand is not lifted until the head has spoken. But as it turned out, between Tallegewi and Lenape, the fighters had the best of it."

He sighed, making the salutation to the dead as he looked off, across the burial-grounds, to the crumbling heap of the god-house.

"But I don't understand," said Dorcas; "were Ongyatasse and White Quiver friends or enemies?"

"They were two foes who loved one another, and though their tribes fell into long and bloody war, between these two there was highness and, at the end, most wonderful kindness. The first time that we got Ongyatasse to his feet and he found that his knee, though feeble, was as good as ever, he said to White Quiver, leaning on his shoulder,--

"'Concerning the call to Council, there was more to it than was written on the scroll, the meaning of which was hidden from me who carried it.'

"'Which is no news to me,' said the Lenni-Lenape; 'also,' he said, 'the message was arranged beforehand, for it required no answer.'

"I asked him how he knew that, and he mocked at me.

"'Any time these five days you could have gone forward with the answer had it been important for you to get back to Cool Waters!'

"That was true. I could have left Ongyatasse and gone on alone, but nothing that had happened so far had made us think that we must get back quickly. White Quiver asked us one day what reason Well-Praised had given for requiring that the Lenni-Lenape should pass through the country with not more than twenty fighting men in the party. To save the game, we told him, which seemed to us reasonable; though I think from that hour we began to feel that the Tallegewi, with all their walled towns and monuments, had been put somehow in the wrong by the wild tribes of Shinaki.

"We stayed on in the ravine, waiting on Ongyatasse's knee, until we saw the new rim of the Halting Moon curled up like a feather. The leaves of the buckeye turned clear yellow and the first flock of wild geese went over. We waited one more day for White Quiver to show us a short cut to the Maumee Trail, and just when we had given him up, we were aware of a strange Lenape in warpaint moving among the shadows. He stood off from us with his arms folded and his face was as bleak as a winter-bitten wood.

"'Wash the lie from your mouth,' he said, 'and follow.'

"Without a word he turned and began to move from us through the smoky light with which the wood was filling. His head was cropped for war--that was why we did not know him--and along the shoulder he turned toward us was the long scrape of a spear-point. That was why we followed, saying nothing. Toward daylight the lame knee began to give trouble. White Quiver came back and put his shoulder under Ongyatasse's, so we moved forward, wordlessly. Birds awoke in the woods, and hoarfrost lay white on the crisped grasses.

"On a headland from which the lake glinted white as a blade of flint on the horizon, we waited the sunrise. Smoke arose, from Wabashiki, from the direction of the Maumee settlements, from the lake shore towns; tall plumes of smoke shook and threatened. Curtly, while we ate, White Quiver told us what had happened; how the Tallegewi, in violation of the treaty, had fallen suddenly on scattered bands of the Lenni-Lenape and all but exterminated them. The Tallegewi said that it was because they had discovered that the Lenni-Lenape had plotted to fall upon our towns, as soon as the corn was harvested, and take them. But White Quiver thought that the whole thing was a plan of Well-Praised from the beginning. He had been afraid to refuse passage to the Lenape, on account of their great numbers, and had arranged to have them broken up in small parties so that they could be dealt with separately."

"And which was it?" Oliver wished to know.

"It was a thousand years ago," said the Mound-Builder. "Who remembers? But we were ashamed, my friend and I, for we understood now that the secret meaning of our message about the Horned Heads had been that the Tallegewi should fall upon the Lenape wherever they found them. You remember that it was part of the question and answer that they 'came into the fields and ate up the harvest.'

"There might have been a plot, but, on the other hand, we knew that the painted scroll had been a blind to make the Lenni-Lenape think that the Tallegewi would do nothing until they had taken counsel. But we had carried a war message with peace upon our mouths and we were ashamed before White Quiver. We had talked much highness with him, and besides, we loved him. As it turned out we were not wrong in thinking he loved us. As we stood making out the points of direction for the trail, Ongyatasse's knee gave under him, and as White Quiver put out his arm without thinking, a tremor passed over them. They stood so leaning each on each for a moment. 'Your trail lies thus ... and thus ...' said the Lenape, 'but I do not know what you will find at the end of it.' Then he loosed his arm from my friend's shoulder, took a step back, and the forest closed about him.

"We were two days more on the trail, though we did not go directly to Cool Waters. Some men of the Painted Turtles that we met, told us the fight had passed from the neighborhood of the towns and gathered at Bent Bar Crossing. Our fathers were both there, which we made an excuse for joining them. At several places we saw evidences of fighting. All the bands of Lenni-Lenape that were not too far in our territory had come hurrying back toward Fish River, and other bands, as the rumor of fighting spread, came down out of Shinaki like buzzards to a carcass. From Cool Waters to Namae-sippu, the Dark Wood was full of war-cries and groaning. At Fish River the Tallegewi fell in hundreds ... there is a mound there ... at Bent Bar the Lenni-Lenape held the ford, keeping a passage open for flying bands that were pressed up from the south by the Painted Turtles. Ongyatasse went about getting together his old band from the Three Towns, fretting because we were not allowed to take the front of the battle.

"Three days the fight raged about the crossing. The Lenni-Lenape were the better bowmen; their long arrows carried heavier points. Some that I found in the breasts of my friends, I had made, and it made my own heart hot within me. The third day, men from the farther lake towns came up the river in their canoes, and the Lenape, afraid of being cut off from their friends in the Dark Wood, broke across the river. As soon as they began to go, our young men, who feared the fight would be over without them, could not be held back. Ongyatasse at our head, we plunged into the river after them.

"Even in flight the Lenni-Lenape were most glorious fighters. They dived among the canoes to hack holes in the bottoms, and rising from under the sides they pulled the paddlers bodily into the river. We were mad with our first fight, we youngsters, for we let them lead us up over the bank and straight into ambush. We were the Young-Men-Who-Never-Turned-Back.

"That was a true name for many of us," said the Mound-Builder. "I remember Ongyatasse's shrill eagle cry above the '_G'we! G'we_!' of the Lenni-Lenape, and the next thing I knew I was struggling in the river, bleeding freely from a knife wound, and somebody was pulling me into a canoe and safety."

"And Ongyatasse--?" The children looked at the low mound between the Council Place and the God-House.

The Mound-Builder nodded.

"We put our spears together to make a tent over him before the earth was piled," he said, "and it was good to be able to do even so much as that for him. For we thought at first we should never find him. He was not on the river, nor in our side of the Dark Wood, and the elders would not permit us to go across in search of him. But at daylight the gatherers of the dead saw something moving from under the mist that hid the opposite bank of the river. We waited, arrow on bowstring, not knowing if it were one of our own coming back to us or a Lenape asking for parley. But as it drew near we saw it was a cropped head, and he towed a dead Tallega by the hair. Ripples that spread out from his quiet wake took the sun, and the measured dip of the swimmer's arm was no louder than the whig of the cooter that paddled in the shallows.

"It had been a true word that Ongyatasse had given his life and his luck to White Quiver; the Lenape had done his best to give them back again. As he came ashore with the stiffened form, we saw him take the white deer amulet from his own neck and fasten it around the neck of Ongyatasse. Then, disdaining even to make the Peace sign for his own safe returning, he plunged into the river again, swimming steadily without haste until the fog hid him."

The Mound-Builder stood up, wrapping his feather mantle about him and began to move down the slope of the Town Mound, the children following. There were ever so many things they wished to hear about, which they hoped he might be going to tell them, but halfway down he turned and pointed. Over south and east a thin blue film of smoke rose up straight from the dark forest.

"That's for you, I think. Your friend, the Onondaga, is signaling you; he knows the end of the story."

Taking hands, the children ran straight in the direction of the smoke signal, along the trail which opened before them.

X

THE MAKING OF A SHAMAN: A TELLING OF THE IROQUOIS TRAIL, BY THE ONONDAGA

Down the Mound-Builder's graded way the children ran looking for the Onondaga. Like all the trail in the Museum Country it covered a vast tract of country in a very little while, so that it was no time at all before they came out among high, pine-covered swells, that broke along the watercourses into knuckly granite headlands. From one of these, steady puffs of smoke arose, and a moment later they could make out the figure of an Indian turning his head from side to side as he searched the surrounding country with the look of eagles. They knew him at once, by the Medicine bundle at his belt and the slanting Iroquois feather, for their friend the Onondaga.

"I was looking for you by the lake shore trail," he explained as Oliver and Dorcas Jane climbed up to him. "You must have come by the Musking-ham-Mahoning; it drops into the Trade Trail of the Iroquois yonder,"--he pointed south and east,--"the Great Trail, from the Mohican-ittuck to the House of Thunder." He meant the Hudson River and the Falls of Niagara. "Even at our village, which was at the head of the lake here, we could hear the Young Thunders, shouting from behind the falls," he told them.

A crooked lake lay below them like a splinter of broken glass between the headlands. From the far end of it the children could see smoke rising. "We used to signal our village from here when we went on the war-trail," said the Onondaga; "we would cut our mark on a tree as we went out, and as we came back we added the war count. I was looking for an old score of mine to-day."

"Had it anything to do with the Mound-Builders?" Dorcas wished to know. "He said you knew the end of that story."

The Onondaga shook his head.

"That was a hundred years before my time, and is a Telling of the Lenni-Lenape. In the Red Score it is written, the Red Score of the Lenni-Lenape. When my home was in the village there, the Five Nations held all the country between the lakes and the Mohican-ittuck. But there were many small friendly tribes along the borders, Algonquian mostly."