The Basket Woman Part 6

By this he knew he had waked up into the time of which the Basket Woman had told him, before fire was brought to the tribes, when men and beasts talked together with understanding, and the Coyote was the Friend and Counselor of man. They ranged together by wood and open swale, the boy who was to be called Fire Bringer and the keen, gray dog of the wilderness, and saw the tribesmen catching fish in the creeks with their hands and the women digging roots with sharp stones. This they did in summer and fared well, but when winter came they ran nakedly in the snow or huddled in caves of the rocks and were very miserable. When the boy saw this he was very unhappy, and brooded over it until the Coyote noticed it.

"It is because my people suffer and have no way to escape the cold,"

said the boy.

"I do not feel it," said the Coyote.

"That is because of your coat of good fur, which my people have not, except they take it in the chase, and it is hard to come by."

"Let them run about, then," said the Counselor, "and keep warm."

"They run till they are weary," said the boy, "and there are the young children and the very old. Is there no way for them?"

"Come," said the Coyote, "let us go to the hunt."

"I will hunt no more," the boy answered him, "until I have found a way to save my people from the cold. Help me, O Counselor!"

But the Coyote had run away. After a time he came back and found the boy still troubled in his mind.

"There is a way, O Man Friend," said the Coyote, "and you and I must take it together, but it is very hard."

"I will not fail of my part," said the boy.

"We will need a hundred men and women, strong and swift runners."

"I will find them," the boy insisted, "only tell me."

"We must go," said the Coyote, "to the Burning Mountain by the Big Water and bring fire to your people."

Said the boy, "What is fire?"

Then the Coyote considered a long time how he should tell the boy what fire is. "It is," said he, "red like a flower, yet it is no flower; neither is it a beast, though it runs in the gra.s.s and rages in the wood and devours all. It is very fierce and hurtful and stays not for asking, yet if it is kept among stones and fed with small sticks, it will serve the people well and keep them warm."

"How is it to be come at?"

"It has its lair in the Burning Mountain, and the Fire Spirits guard it night and day. It is a hundred days' journey from this place, and because of the jealousy of the Fire Spirits no man dare go near it. But I, because all beasts are known to fear it much, may approach it without hurt and, it may be, bring you a brand from the burning. Then you must have strong runners for every one of the hundred days to bring it safely home."

"I will go and get them," said the boy; but it was not so easily done as said. Many there were who were slothful and many were afraid, but the most disbelieved it wholly, for, they said, "How should this boy tell us of a thing of which we have never heard!" But at the last the boy and their own misery persuaded them.

The Coyote advised them how the march should begin. The boy and the Counselor went foremost, next to them the swiftest runners, with the others following in the order of their strength and speed. They left the place of their home and went over the high mountains where great jagged peaks stand up above the snow, and down the way the streams led through a long stretch of giant wood where the sombre shade and the sound of the wind in the branches made them afraid. At nightfall where they rested one stayed in that place, and the next night another dropped behind, and so it was at the end of each day's journey. They crossed a great plain where waters of mirage rolled over a cracked and parching earth and the rim of the world was hidden in a bluish mist; so they came at last to another range of hills, not so high but tumbled thickly together, and beyond these, at the end of the hundred days, to the Big Water quaking along the sand at the foot of the Burning Mountain.

It stood up in a high and peaked cone, and the smoke of its burning rolled out and broke along the sky. By night the glare of it reddened the waves far out on the Big Water when the Fire Spirits began their dance.

Then said the Counselor to the boy who was soon to be called the Fire Bringer, "Do you stay here until I bring you a brand from the burning; be ready and right for running, and lose no time, for I shall be far spent when I come again, and the Fire Spirits will pursue me." Then he went up the mountain, and the Fire Spirits when they saw him come were laughing and very merry, for his appearance was much against him. Lean he was, and his coat much the worse for the long way he had come.

Slinking he looked, inconsiderable, scurvy, and mean, as he has always looked, and it served him as well then as it serves him now. So the Fire Spirits only laughed, and paid him no farther heed. Along in the night, when they came out to begin their dance about the mountain, the Coyote stole the fire and began to run away with it down the slope of the Burning Mountain. When the Fire Spirits saw what he had done, they streamed out after him red and angry in pursuit, with a sound like a swarm of bees.

The boy saw them come, and stood up in his place clean limbed and taut for running. He saw the sparks of the brand stream back along the Coyote's flanks as he carried it in his mouth and stretched forward on the trail, bright against the dark bulk of the mountain like a falling star. He heard the singing sound of the Fire Spirits behind and the labored breath of the Counselor nearing through the dark. Then the good beast panted down beside him, and the brand dropped from his jaws. The boy caught it up, standing bent for the running as a bow to speeding the arrow; out he shot on the homeward path, and the Fire Spirits snapped and sung behind him. Fast as they pursued he fled faster, until he saw the next runner stand up in his place to receive the brand. So it pa.s.sed from hand to hand, and the Fire Spirits tore after it through the scrub until they came to the mountains of the snows. These they could not pa.s.s, and the dark, sleek runners with the backward-streaming brand bore it forward, shining star-like in the night, glowing red through sultry noons, violet pale in twilight glooms, until they came in safety to their own land. Here they kept it among stones, and fed it with small sticks, as the Coyote had advised, until it warmed them and cooked their food. As for the boy by whom fire came to the tribes, he was called the Fire Bringer while he lived, and after that, since there was no other with so good a right to the name, it fell to the Coyote; and this is the sign that the tale is true, for all along his lean flanks the fur is singed and yellow as it was by the flames that blew backward from the brand when he brought it down from the Burning Mountain. As for the fire, that went on broadening and brightening and giving out a cheery sound until it broadened into the light of day, and Alan sat up to hear it crackling under the coffee-pot, where his father was cooking their breakfast.

THE CROOKED FIR

The pipsissawa, which is sometimes called prince's pine, is half as tall as the woodchuck that lives under the brown boulder; and the seedling fir in his first season was as tall as the prince's pine, so for the time they made the most of each other's company. The woodchuck and the pipsissawa were never to be any taller, but the silver fir was to keep on growing as long as he stood in the earth and drew sap. In his second season, which happened to be a good growing year, the fir was as tall as the woodchuck and began to look about him.

The forest of silver firs grew on a hill-slope up from a water-course as far as the borders of the long-leaved pines. Where the trees stood close together the earth was brown with the litter of a thousand years, and little gray hawks hunted in their green, windy glooms. In the open s.p.a.ces there were thickets of meadowsweet, fireweed, monkshood, and columbine, with saplings and seedlings in between. When the fir which was as tall as the woodchuck had grown a year or two longer, he made a discovery. All the firs on the hill-slope were crooked! Their trunks bulged out at the base toward the downward pitch of the hill; and it is the proper destiny of fir trees to be straight.

"They should be straight," said the seedling fir. "I feel it in my fibres that a fir tree should be straight." He looked up at the fir mother very far above him on her way to the sky, with the sun and the wind in her star-built boughs.

"I shall be straight," said the seedling fir.

"Ah, do not be too sure of it," said the fir mother. But for all that the seedling fir was very sure, and when the snow tucked him in for the winter he took a long time to think about it. The snows are wonderfully deep in the canon of the silver firs. From where they gather in the upper air the fir mother shakes them lightly down, packing so softly and so warm that the seedlings and the pipsissawas do not mind.

About the time the fir had grown tall enough to be called a sapling he made another discovery. The fir mother had also a crooked trunk. The sapling was greatly shocked; he hardly liked to speak of it to the fir mother. He remembered his old friend the pipsissawa, but he had so outgrown her that there was really no comfort in trying to make himself understood, so he spoke to the woodchuck. The woodchuck was no taller than he used to be, but when he climbed up on the brown boulder above his house he was on a level with the sapling fir, and though he was not much of a talker he was a great thinker and had opinions.

"Really," said the fir, "I hardly like to speak of it, but you are such an old friend; do you see what a crook the fir mother has in her trunk?

We firs you know were intended to be straight."

"That," said the woodchuck, "is on account of the snow."

"But, oh, my friend," said the sapling, "you must be mistaken. The snow is soft and comfortable and braces one up. I ought to know, for I spend whole winters in it."

"_Gru-r-ru-_," said the woodchuck crossly; "well for you that you do, or I should have eaten you off by now."

After this the little fir kept his thoughts to himself; he was very much afraid of the woodchuck, and there is nothing a young fir fears so much as being eaten off before it has a chance to bear cones. But in fact the woodchuck spent the winter under the snow himself. He went into his house and shut the door when the first feel of snow was in the air, and did not come out until green things began to grow in the cleared s.p.a.ces.

Not many winters after that the fir was sufficiently tall to hold the green cross, that all firs bear on their topmost bough, above the snow most of the winter through. Now he began to learn a great many things.

The first of these was about the woodchuck.

"Really that fellow is a great braggart," said the fir; "I cannot think how I came to be afraid of him."

In those days the sapling saw the deer getting down in the flurry of the first snows to the feeding grounds on the lower hills, saw the mountain sheep nodding their great horns serenely in the lee of a tall cliff through the wildest storms. In the spring he saw the brown bears shambling up the trails, ripping the bark off of dead trees to get at the worms and grubs that harbored there; lastly he saw the woodchuck come out of his hole as if nothing had ever happened.

And now as the winters came on, the fir began to feel the weight of the snow. When it was wet and heavy and clung to its branches, the little fir shivered and moaned.

"Droop your boughs," creaked the fir mother; "droop them as I do, and the snow will fall."

So the sapling drooped his fan-spread branches until they lay close to the trunk; and the snow wreaths slipped away and piled thickly about his trunk. But when the snow lay deep over all the slope, it packed and slid down toward the ravine and pressed strongly against the sapling fir.

"Oh, I shall be torn from my roots," he cried; "I shall be broken off."

"Bend," said the fir mother, "bend, and you will not break." So the young fir bent before the snow until he was curved like a bow, but when the spring came and the sap ran in his veins, he straightened his trunk anew and spread his branches in a star-shaped whorl.

"After all," said the sapling, "it is not such a great matter to keep straight; it only requires an effort."

So he went on drooping and bending to the winter snows, growing strong and straight with the spring, and rejoicing. About this time the fir began to feel a tingling in his upper branches.

"Something is going to happen," he said; something agreeable in fact, for the tree was fifty years old, and it was time to grow cones. For fifty years a silver fir has nothing to do but to grow branches, thrown out in annual circles, every one in the shape of a cross. Then it grows cones on the topmost whorl, royal purple and burnished gold, erect on the ends of the branches like Christmas candles. The sapling fir had only three in his first season of bearing, but he was very proud of them, for now he was no longer a sapling, but a tree.