The Trail Book Part 16

There were many handsome skins and baskets in her father's hut which had been given to him when he was Medicine Man. She felt sure Waba-mooin would not have touched them. And as for me, I was young enough to want Waba-mooin to see that I was also a Shaman.

"We stole into Nukewis's hut in the dark, and when it was morning a light snow was over the ground to cover our tracks, and there was our smoke going up and the great moose standing at our door chewing his cud and over the door the Medicine bag of Nukewis's father. How the neighbors were astonished! They ran for Waba-mooin, and when I saw him coming in all his Shaman's finery, I put on the old Medicine Man's shirt and his pipe and went out to smoke with him as one Shaman with another."

The Onondaga laughed to himself, remembering. "It was funny to see him try to go through with it, but there was nothing else for him to do. I ought to have punished him a little for what he did to Nukewis, but my heart was too full of happiness and my Mystery. And perhaps it was punishment enough to have me staying there in the village with all the folk bringing me presents and neglecting Waba-mooin. I think he was glad when we set out for my own village in the Moon of the Sap Running.

"I knew my mother would be waiting for me, and besides, I wished my son to be born an Onondaga."

"And what became of the old moose?"

"Somewhere on the trail home we lost him. Perhaps he heard his own tribe calling...and perhaps... He was the Holder of the Heavens to me, and from that time neither I nor my wife ate any moose meat. That is how it is when the Holder of the Heavens shows Himself to his children. But when I came by the tree where I had cut the first score of my search for Him, I cut a picture of the great moose, with my wife and I on either side of him."

The Onondaga pointed with his feathered pipe to a wide-boled chestnut a rod or two down the slope. "It was that I was looking for to-day," he said. "If you look you will find it."

And continuing to point with the long feathered stem of his pipe, the children rose quietly hand in hand and went to look.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

XI

THE PEARLS OF COFACHIQUE: HOW LUCAS DE AYLLON CAME TO LOOK FOR THEM AND WHAT THE CACICA FAR-LOOKING DID TO HIM; TOLD BY THE PELICAN

One morning toward the end of February the children were sitting on the last bench at the far end of the Bird Gallery, which is the nicest sort of place to sit on a raw, slushy day. You can look out from it on one side over the flamingo colony of the Bahamas, and on the other straight into the heart of the Cuthbert Rookery in Florida. Just opposite is the green and silver coral islet of Cay Verde, with the Man-of-War Birds nesting among the flat leaves of the sea-grape.

If you sit there long enough and n.o.body comes by to interrupt, you can taste the salt of the spindrift over the banks of Cay Verde, and watch the palmetto leaves begin to wave like swords in the sea wind. That is what happened to Oliver and Dorcas Jane. The water stirred and shimmered and the long flock of flamingoes settled down, each to its own mud hummock on the crowded summer beaches. All at once Oliver thought of something.

"I wonder," he said, "if there are trails on the water and through the air?"

"Why, of course," said the Man-of-War Bird; "how else would we find our islet among so many? North along the banks till we sight the heads of Na.s.sau, then east of Stirrup Cay, keeping the scent of the land flowers to windward, to the Great Bahama, and west by north to where blue water runs between the Biscayne Keys to the mouth of the Miami. That is how we reach the mainland in season, and back again to Cay Verde."

"It sounds like a long way," said Oliver.

"That's nothing," said the tallest Flamingo. "We go often as far east as the Windward Islands, and west to the Isthmus. But the ships go farther.

We have never been to the place where the ships come from."

It was plain that the Flamingo was thinking of a ship as another and more mysterious bird. The Man-of-War Bird seemed to know better. The children could see, when he stretched out his seven-foot spread of wing, that he was a great traveler.

"What _I_ should like to know," he said, "is how the ships find their way. With us we simply rise higher and higher, above the fogs, until we see the islands scattered like green nests and the banks and shoals which from that height make always the same pattern in the water, brown streaks of weed, gray shallows, and deep water blue. But the ships, though they never seem to leave the surface of the water, can make a shorter course than we in any kind of weather."

Oliver was considering how he could explain a ship's compa.s.s to the birds, but only the tail end of his thinking slipped out. "They call some of them men-of-war, too," he chuckled.

"You must have thought it funny the first time you saw one," said Dorcas Jane.

"Not me, but my ancestors," said the Man-of-War Bird; "_they_ saw the Great Admiral when he first sailed in these waters. They saw the three tall galleons looming out of a purple mist on the eve of discovery, their topsails rosy with the sunset fire. The Admiral kept pacing, pacing; watching, on the one hand, lest his men surprise him with a mutiny, and on the other, glancing overside for a green bough or a floating log, anything that would be a sign of land. We saw him come in pride and wonder, and we saw him go in chains."

Like all the Museum people, the Man-of-War Bird said "we" when he spoke of his ancestors.

"There were others," said the Flamingo. "I remember an old man looking for a fountain."

"Ponce de Leon," supplied Dorcas Jane, proud that she could p.r.o.nounce it.

"There is no harm in a fountain," said a Brown Pelican that had come sailing into Cuthbert Rookery with her wings sloped downward like a parachute. "It was the gold-seekers who filled the islands with the thunder of their guns and the smoke of burning huts."

The children turned toward the Pelican among the mangrove trees, crowded with nests of egret and heron and rosy hornbill.

The shallow water of the lagoon ran into gold-tipped ripples. In every one the low sun laid a tiny flake of azure. Over the far sh.o.r.e there was a continual flick and flash of wings, like a whirlwind playing with a heap of waste paper. Crooked flights of flamingoes made a moving reflection on the water like a scarlet snake, but among the queer mangrove stems, that did not seem to know whether they were roots or branches, there was a lovely morning stillness. It was just the place and hour for a story, and while the Brown Pelican opened her well-filled maw to her two hungry nestlings, the Snowy Egret went on with the subject.

"They were a gallant and cruel and heroic and stupid lot, the Spanish gold-seekers," she said. "They thought nothing of danger and hunger, but they could not find their way without a guide any further than their eyes could see, and they behaved very badly toward the poor Indians."

"We saw them all," said the Flamingo,--"Cortez and Balboa and Pizarro.

We saw Panfilo Narvaez put in at Tampa Bay, full of zeal and gold hunger, and a year later we saw him at Appalache, beating his stirrup irons into nails to make boats to carry him back to Havana. We alone know why he never reached there."

The Pelican by this time had got rid of her load of fish and settled herself for conversation. "Whatever happened to them," she said, "they came back,--Spanish, Portuguese, and English,--back they came. I remember how Lucas de Ayllon came to look for the pearls of Cofachique--"

"Pearls!" said the children both at once.

"Very good ones," said the Pelican, nodding her pouched beak; "as large as hazel nuts and with a l.u.s.ter like a wet beach at evening. The best were along the Savannah River where some of my people had had a rookery since any of them could remember. Ayllon discovered the pearls when he came up from Hispaniola looking for slaves, but it was an evil day for him when he came again to fill his pockets with them, for by that time the lady of Cofachique was looking for Ayllon."

"For Soto, you mean," said the Snowy Egret,--

"Hernando de Soto, the Adelantado of Florida, and that is _my_ story."

"It is all one story," insisted the Pelican. "Ayllon began it. His ship put in at the Savannah at the time of the pearling, when the best of our young men were there, and among them Young Pine, son of Far-Looking, the Chief Woman.

"The Indians had heard of ships by this time, but they still believed the Spaniards were Children of the Sun, and trusted them. They had not yet learned what a Spaniard will do for gold. They did not even know what gold was, for there was none of it at Cofachique. The Cacique came down to the sea to greet the ships, with fifty of his best fighting men behind him, and when the Spaniard invited them aboard for a feast, he let Young Pine go with them. He was as straight as a pine, the young Cacique, keen and strong-breasted, and about his neck he wore a twist of pearls of three strands, white as sea foam. Ayllon's eyes glistened as he looked at them, and he gave word that the boy was not to be mishandled. For as soon as he had made the visiting Indians drunk with wine, which they had never tasted before and drank only for politeness, the Spaniard hoisted sail for Hispaniola.

"Young Pine stood on the deck and heard his father calling to him from the sh.o.r.e, and saw his friends shot as they jumped overboard, or were dragged below in chains, and did not know what to do at such treachery.

The wine foamed in his head and he hung sick against the rail until Ayllon came sidling and fidgeting to find out where the pearls came from. He fingered the strand on Young Pine's neck, making signs of friendship.

"The ship was making way fast, and the sh.o.r.e of Cofachique was dark against the sun. Ayllon had sent his men to the other side of the ship while he talked with Young Pine, for he did not care to have them learn about the pearls.

"Young Pine lifted the strand from his neck, for by Ayllon's orders he was not yet in chains. While the Spaniard looked it over greedily, the boy saw his opportunity. He gave a shout to the sea-birds that wheeled and darted about the galleon, the shout the fishers give when they throw offal to the gulls, and as the wings gathered and thickened to hide him from the guns, he dived straight away over the ship's side into the darkling water.

"All night he swam, steering by the death-fires which the pearlers had built along the beaches, and just as the dawn came up behind him to turn the white-topped breakers into green fire, the land swell caught him.

Four days later a search party looking for those who had jumped overboard, found his body tumbled among the weeds along the outer shoals and carried it to his mother, the Cacica, at Talimeco.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "She could see the thoughts of a man while they were still in his heart"]

"She was a wonderful woman, the Chief Woman of Cofachique, and terrible," said the Pelican. "It was not for nothing she was called Far-Looking. She could see the thoughts of a man while they were still in his heart, and the doings of men who were far distant. When she wished to know what n.o.body could tell her, she would go into the Silence; she would sit as still as a brooding pelican; her limbs would stiffen and her eyes would stare--

"That is what she did the moment she saw that the twist of pearls was gone from her son's neck. She went silent with her hand on his dead breast and looked across the seas into the cruel heart of the Spaniard and saw what would happen. 'He will come back,' she said; 'he will come back to get what I shall give him for _this_.'

"She meant the body of Young Pine, who was her only son," said the Pelican, tucking her own gawky young under her breast, "and that is something a mother never forgets. She spent the rest of her time planning what she would do to Lucas de Ayllon when he came back.

"There was a lookout built in the palmetto scrub below the pearling place, and every day canoes scouted far to seaward, with runners ready in case ships were sighted. Talimeco was inland about a hundred miles up the river and the Cacica herself seldom left it.