The Trail Book Part 2

"'Come away, little fool,' he said. 'He is our meat. Have we not followed him for three days and trapped him?'

"The boy looked at him under his brows, drawn level.

"'That was my father's spear that stuck in him, Opata,' he said.

"Now, as the man spoke, I began to see what they had done to me these three days, for there was no way out of the ravine, and the women had brought their fleshing-knives and baskets: but the boy was quicker even than my anger. He reached up a hand to either of my tusks,--he could barely lay hands on them,--and his voice shook, though I do not think it was with anger. 'He is mine to kill,' he said, 'according to custom. He is my Arrumpa, and I call the tribe to witness. Not one of you shall lay hands on him until one of us has killed the other.'

"Then I lifted up my trunk over him, for my heart swelled against the hunters, and I gave voice as a bull should when he walks by himself.

"'Arr-rr-ump!' I said. And the people were all silent with astonishment.

"Finally the man who had first spoken, spoke again, very humbly, 'Great Chief, give us leave to take away your father.' So we gave them leave.

They took the hurt man--his back was broken--away by the vine ladders, and my young man went and lay face down where his father had lain, and shook with many strange noises while water came out of his eyes. When he sat up at last and saw me blowing dust on the spear-cut in my side to stop the bleeding, he gathered broad leaves, dipped them in pine gum, and laid them on the cut. Then I blew dust on these, and seeing that I was more comfortable, Taku-Wakin--that was what I learned to call him--saluted with both hands to his head, palms outward. 'Friend,' he said,--'for if you are not my friend I think I have not one other in the world,--besides, I am too little to kill you,--I go to bury my father.'

"For three days I bathed my knee in the spring, and saw faces come to peer about the edge of it and heard the beat of the village drums. The third day my young man came, wearing his father's collar of bear's teeth, with neither fire-stick nor food nor weapon upon him. "'Now I am all the man my mother has,' he said; 'I must do what is necessary to become a tribesman.'

"I did not know then what he meant, but it seems it was a custom."

All the Indians in the group that had gathered about the Mastodon, nodded at this.

"It was so in my time," said the Mound-Builder. "When a youth has come to the age where he is counted a man, he goes apart and neither eats nor drinks until, in the shape of some living thing, the Great Mystery has revealed itself to him.

"It was so he explained it to me," agreed Arrumpa; "and for three days he ate and drank nothing, but walked by himself talking to his G.o.d.

Other times he would talk to me, scratching my hurts and taking the ticks out of my ears, until--I do not know what it was, but between me and Taku-Wakin it happened that we understood, each of us, what the other was thinking in his heart as well as if we had words--Is this also a custom?"

A look of intelligence pa.s.sed between the members of his audience.

"Once to every man," said an Indian who leaned against Moke-icha's boulder, "when he shuts all thought of killing out of his heart and gives himself to the beast as to a brother, knowledge which is different from the knowledge of the chase comes to both of them.

"Oh," said Oliver, "I had a dog once--" But he became very much embarra.s.sed when he discovered that he had drawn the attention of the company. It had always been difficult for him to explain why it was he had felt so certain that his dog and he had always known what the other was thinking; but the Indians and the animals understood him.

"All this Taku explained to me," went on Arrumpa. "The fourth day, when Taku fainted for lack of food, I cradled him in my tusks and was greatly troubled. At last I laid him on the fresh gra.s.s by the spring and blew water on him. Then he sat up laughing and spluttering, but faintly.

"'Now am I twice a fool,' he said, 'not to know from the first that you are my Medicine, the voice of the Mystery.'

"Then he shouted for his mother, who came down from the top of the ravine, very timidly, and fed him.

"After that he would come to me every day, sometimes with a bough of wild apples or a basket of acorns, and I would set him on my neck so he could scratch between my ears and tell me all his troubles. His father, he said, had been a strong man who put himself at the head of the five chiefs of the tribe and persuaded them to leave off fighting one another and band together against the enemy tribes. Opata, the man who had wished to kill me, was the man likeliest to be made High Chief in his father's place.

"'And then my bad days will begin,' said Taku-Wakin, 'for he hates me for my father's sake, and also a little for yours, Old Two-Tails, and he will persuade the Council to give my mother to another man and I shall be made subject to him. Worse,' he said,--'the Great Plan of my father will come to nothing.'

"He was always talking about this Great Plan and fretting over it, but I was too new to the customs of men to ask what he meant by it.

"'If I had but a Sign,' he said, 'then they would give me my father's place in the Council ... but I am too little, and I have not yet killed anything worth mentioning.'

"So he would sit on my neck and drum with his heels while he thought, and there did not seem to be anything I could do about it. By this time my knee was quite well. I had eaten all the brush in the ravine and was beginning to be lonely. Taku wasn't able to visit me so often, for he had his mother and young brothers to kill for.

"So one night when the moon came walking red on the trail of the day, far down by Two Rivers I heard some of my friends trumpeting; therefore I pulled down young trees along the sides of the ravine, with great lumps of earth, and battered the rotten cliffs until they crumbled in a heap by which I scrambled up again.

"I must have traveled a quarter of the moon's course before I heard the patter of bare feet in the trail and a voice calling:--

"'Up! Take me up, Arrumpa!'

"So I took him up, quite spent with running, and yet not so worn out but that he could smack me soundly between the eyes, as no doubt I deserved.

"'Beast of a bad heart,' he said, 'did I not tell you that to-morrow the moon is full and the Five Chiefs hold Council?' So he had, but my thick wits had made nothing of it. 'If you leave me this night,' said Taku, 'then they will say that my Medicine has left me and my father's place will be given to Opata.'

"'Little Chief,' I said, 'I did not know that you had need of me, but it came into my head that I also had need of my own people. Besides, the brush is eaten.'

"'True, true!' he said, and drummed on my forehead. 'Take me home,' he said at last, 'for I have followed you half the night, and I must not seem wearied at the Council.'

"So I took him back as far as the Arch Rock which springs high over the trail by which the men of Taku's village went out to the hunting. There was a cleft under the wing of the Arch, close to the cliff, and every man going out to the hunt threw a dart at it, as an omen. If it stuck, the omen was good, but if the point of the dart broke against the face of the cliff and fell back, the hunter returned to his hut, and if he hunted at all that day, he went out in another direction. We could see the shafts of the darts fast in the cleft, bristling in the moonlight.

"'Wait here, under the Arch,' said Taku-Wakin, 'till I see if the arrow of my thought finds a cleft to stick into.'

"So we waited, watching the white, webby moons of the spiders, wet in the gra.s.s, and the man huts sleeping on the hill, and felt the Dawn's breath p.r.i.c.king the skin of our shoulders. The huts were mere heaps of brush like rats' nests.

"'Shall I walk on the huts for a sign, Little Chief?' said I.

"'Not that, Old Hilltop,' he laughed; 'there are people under the huts, and what good is a Sign without people?'

"Then he told me how his father had become great by thinking, not for his own clan alone, but for all the people--it was because of the long reach of his power that they called him Long-Hand. Now that he was gone there would be nothing but quarrels and petty jealousies. 'They will hunt the same grounds twice over,' said Taku-Wakin; 'they will kill one another when they should be killing their enemies, and in the end the Great Cold will get them.'

"Every year the Great Cold crept nearer. It came like a strong arm and pressed the people west and south so that the tribes bore hard on one another.

"'Since old time,' said Taku-Wakin, 'my people have been sea people. But the People of the Great Cold came down along the ice-rim and cut them off from it. My father had a plan to get to the sea, and a Talking Stick which he was teaching me to understand, but I cannot find it in any of the places where he used to hide it. If I had the Stick I think they would make me chief in my father's place. But if Opata is made chief, then I must give it to him if I find it, and Opata will have all the glory. If I had but a Sign to keep them from making Opata chief...' So he drummed on my head with his heels while I leaned against the Arch Rock--oh, yes, I can sleep very comfortably, standing--and the moon slid down the hill until it shone clear under the rock and touched the feathered b.u.t.ts of the arrows. Then Taku woke me.

"'Up, put me up, Arrumpa! For now I have thought of a Sign that even the Five Chiefs will have respect for.'

"So I put him up until his foot caught in the cleft of the rock and he pried out five of the arrows.

"'Arrows of the Five Chiefs,' he said,--'that the chiefs gave to the G.o.ds to keep, and the G.o.ds have given to me again!'

"That was the way always with Taku-Wakin, he kept all the G.o.d customs of the people, but he never doubted, when he had found what he wanted to do, that the G.o.ds would be on his side. He showed me how every arrow was a little different from the others in the way the blood drain was cut or the shaft feathered.

"'No fear,' he said. 'Every man will know his own when I come to the Council.'

"He hugged the arrows to his breast and laughed over them, so I hugged him with my trunk, and we agreed that once in every full moon I was to come to Burnt Woods, and wait until he called me with something that he took from his girdle and twirled on a thong. I do not know what it was called, but it had a voice like young thunder.

"Like this?" The Mound-Builder cut the air with an oddly shaped bit of wood swung on an arm's-length of string, once lightly, like a covey of quail rising, and then loud like a wind in the full-branched forest.

"Just such another. Thrice he swung it so that I might not mistake the sound, and that was the last I saw of him, hugging his five arrows, with the moon gone pale like a meal-cake, and the tame wolves that skulk between the huts for sc.r.a.ps, slinking off as he spoke to them."

"And did they--the Five Chiefs, I mean--have respect for his arrows?"

Dorcas Jane wondered.

"So he told me. They came from all the nine villages and sat in a council ring, each with the elders of his village behind him, and in front his favorite weapon, tied with eagle feathers for enemies he had slain, and red marks for battles, and other signs and trophies. At the head of the circle there was the spear of Long-Hand, and a place left for the one who should be elected to sit in it. But before the Council had time to begin, came Taku-Wakin with his arms folded--though he told me it was to hide how his heart jumped in his bosom--and took his father's seat. Around the ring of the chiefs and elders ran a growl like the circling of thunder in sultry weather, and immediately it was turned into coughing; every man trying to eat his own exclamation, for, as he sat, Taku laid out, in place of a trophy, the five arrows.

"'Do we sit at a game of knuckle-bone?' said Opata at last, 'or is this a Council of the Elders?'