Part 14 (1/2)

”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 Ongyata.s.se had given his life and his luck to White Quiver; the Lenape had done his best to give them back again.

As he came ash.o.r.e with the stiffened form, we saw him take the white deer amulet from his own neck and fasten it around the neck of Ongyata.s.se. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 sh.o.r.e 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 gla.s.s 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.”

He squatted on his heels beside the fire and felt in his belt for the pipe and tobacco pouch without which no Telling proceeds properly.

”In my youth,” said the Onondaga, ”I was very unhappy because I had no Vision. When my time came I walked in the forest and ate nothing, but the Mystery would not speak to me. Nine days I walked fasting, and then my father came to find me under a pine tree, with my eyes sunk in my head and my ribs like a basket. But because I was ashamed I told him my Mystery was something that could not be talked about, and so I told the Shaman.

”My father was pleased because he thought it meant that I was to be a very great Shaman myself, and the other boys envied me. But in my heart I was uneasy. I did not know what to make of my life because the Holder of the Heavens had not revealed himself to me. To one of my friends he had appeared as an eagle, which meant that he was to be a warrior, keen and victorious; and to another as a fox, so that he studied cunning; but without any vision I did not know what to make of myself. My heart was slack as a wetted bowstring. My father reproached me.

”'The old women had smoke in their eyes,' he said; 'they told me I had a son, now I see it is a woman child.'

”My mother was kinder. 'Tell me,' she said, 'what evil dream unknots the cords of your heart?'

”So at last I told her.

”My mother was a wise woman. 'To a dog or a child,' she said, 'one speaks the first word on the lips, but before a great Shaman one considers carefully. What is a year of your life to the Holder of the Heavens? Go into the forest and wait until his message is ripe for you.'

She was a wise woman.

”So I put aside my bow and quiver, and with them all desire of meat and all thought of killing. With my tomahawk I cut a mark in that chestnut yonder and buried my weapon at the foot of it. I had my knife, my pipe, and my fire-stick. Also I felt happy and important because my mother had made me believe that the Holder of the Heavens thought well of me. I was giving him a year in which to tell me what to do with my life.

”I turned east, for, I said, from the east light comes. It was an old trail even in those days. It follows the watershed from the lake to Oneida, and clears the Mohawk Valley northward. It was the Moon of Tender Leaves when I set out, and by the time nuts began to ripen I had come to the lowest hills of the Adirondacks.