Part 10 (2/2)

”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 s.h.i.+fted his blanket.

”A Dine could have done no more for a friend,” he admitted.

”I see,” said Oliver. ”When the Dine 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 tw.a.n.g of the bowstring and the thras.h.i.+ng about of the kill in the thicket would have told Tse-tse exactly where _they_ were,” said the Navajo. ”The Dine 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 Dine 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 Dine 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 Dine 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 Dine, 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 sc.r.a.pe on the rocks under the roof of Lasting Water, small, like the rasp of a snake coiling. I had forgot there were three Dine 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 Dine 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 Dine 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 Canon, 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 m.u.f.fled the voices as the rings of light withdrew down the long gallery in glimmering reflections. When they pa.s.sed 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-p.r.o.nged 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-Flas.h.i.+ng.”

”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 Riviere. 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-sh.e.l.ls 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.”

<script>