The Trail Book by Mary Austin et al

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"And by and by with the hunger and anxiety about Nukewis, which was the
name she said she should be called by, my thought was not good any more.
I would look at the throat of the moose as he crowded under the hemlock
and think how easily I could slit it with my knife and how good moose
meat toasted on the coals would taste. I was glad when the storm cleared
and left the world all white and trackless. I went out and prayed to the
Holder of the Heavens that he would strengthen me in the keeping of my
vow and also that he would not let the girl die.

"While I prayed a rabbit that had been huddling under the brush and the
snow, came hopping into my trail; it hopped twice and died with the
cold. I took it for a sign; but when I had cooked it and was feeding it
to the girl she said:--

"'Why do you not eat, M'toulin,' for we had taught one another a few
words of our own speech.

"'I am not hungry,' I told her.

"'While I eat I can see that your throat is working with hunger,' she
insisted. And it was true I could have snatched the meat from her like a
wolf, but because of my vow I would not.

"'M'toulin, there is a knife at your belt; why have you not killed the
moose to make meat for us?'

"'Eight moons I have done no killing, seeking the Vision and the Voice,'
I told her. 'It is more than my life to me.'

"When I had finished, she reached over with the last piece of rabbit and
laid it on the fire. It was a sacrifice. As we watched the flame lick it
up, all thought of killing went out of my head like the smoke of
sacrifice, and my thought was good again.

"When the meat she had eaten had made her strong, Nukewis sat up and
crossed her hands on her bosom.

"'M'toulin,' she said, 'the evil that has come on you belongs to me. I
will go away with it. I am a witch and bring evil on those who are
kind to me.'

"'Who says you are a witch?'

"'All my village, and especially Waba-mooin. I brought sickness on the
village, and on you hunger and the breaking of your vow.'

"'I have seen Waba-mooin,' I said. 'I do not think too much of his
opinions.'

"'He is the Shaman of my village,' said Nukewis. 'My father was Shaman
before him, a much greater Shaman than Waba-mooin will ever be. He
wanted my father's Medicine bundle which hung over the door to protect
me; my father left it to me when he died. But afterward there was a
sickness in the village, and Waba-mooin said it was because the powerful
Medicine bundle was left in the hands of an ignorant girl. He said for
the good of the village it ought to be taken away from me. But _I_
thought it was because so many people came to my house with their sick,
because of my Medicine bundle, and Waba-mooin missed their gifts. He
said that if I was not willing to part with my father's bundle, that he
would marry me, but when I would not, then he said that I was a witch!'

"'Where is the bundle now?' I asked her.

"'I hid it near our winter camp before we came into the mountains. But
there was sickness in the mountains and Waba-mooin said that it also was
my fault. So they drove me out with sticks and stones. That is why they
would not take me back.'

"'Then,' I said, 'when Waba-mooin goes back to the winter camp, he will
find the Medicine bundle.'

"'He will never find it,' she said, 'but he will be the only Shaman in
the village and will have all the gifts. But listen, M'toulin, by now
the people are back in their winter home. It is more than two days from
here. If you go without me, they will give you food and shelter, but
with me you will have only hard words and stones. Therefore, I leave
you, M'toulin.' She stood up, made a sign of farewell.

"'You must show me the way to your village first,' I insisted.

"I saw that she meant what she said, and because I was too weak to run
after her, I pretended. I thought that would hold her.

"We should have set out that moment, but a strange lightness came in my
head. I do not know just what happened. I think the storm must have
begun again early in the afternoon. There was a great roaring as of wind
and the girl bending over me, wavering and growing thin like smoke.
Twice I saw the great head of the moose thrust among the hemlock boughs,
and heard Nukewis urging and calling me. She lifted my hands and clasped
them round the antlers of the moose; I could feel his warm breath.... He
threw up his head, drawing me from my bed, wonderfully light upon my
feet. We seemed to move through the storm. I could feel the hairy
shoulder of the moose and across his antlers Nukewis calling me. I felt
myself carried along like a thin bubble of life in the storm that poured
down from the Adirondack like Niagara. At last I slipped into darkness.

"I do not know how long this lasted, but presently I was aware of a
light that began to grow and spread around me. It came from the face of
the moose, and when I looked up out of my darkness it changed to the
face of a great kind man. He had on the headdress of a chief priest, the
tall headdress of eagle plumes and antlers. I had hold of one of them,
and his arm was around and under me. But I knew very well who held me.

"'You have appeared to me at last,' I said to him.

"'I have appeared, my son.' His voice was kind as the sound of summer
waters.

"'I looked for you long, O Taryenya-wagon!'

"'You looked for me among your little brothers of the wild,' he said,
'and for you the Vision was among men, my son.'

"'How, among men?'

"'What you did for that poor girl when you put your good thought between
her and harm. That you must do for men.'

"'I am to be a Shaman, then?' I thought of my father.

"'According to a man's power,' said the Holder of the Heavens,--'as my
power comes upon him....'"

The Onondaga puffed silently for a while on his pipe.

Dorcas Jane fidgeted. "But I don't understand," she said at last; "just
what was it that happened?"

"It was my Mystery," said the Onondaga; "my Vision that came to me out
of the fasting and the sacrifice. You see, there had been very little
food since leaving Crooked Water, and Nukewis--"

"You gave it all to her." Dorcas nodded. "But still I don't understand?"

"The moose had begun to travel down the mountain and like a good brother
he came back for me. Nukewis lifted me up and bound me to his antlers,
holding me from the other side, but I was too weak to notice.

"We must have traveled that way for hours through the storm until we
reached the tall woods below the limit of the snow. When I came to
myself, I was lying on a bed of fern in a bright morning and Nukewis was
cooking quail which she had snared with a slip noose made of her hair. I
ate--I could eat now that I had had my Vision--and grew strong. All the
upper mountain was white like a tent of deerskin, but where we were
there was only thin ice on the edges of the streams.

"We stayed there for one moon. I wished to get my strength back, and
besides, we wished to get married, Nukewis and I."

"But how could you, without any party?" Dorcas wished to know. She had
never seen anybody get married, but she knew it was always spoken of as
a Wedding Party.

"We had the party four months later when we got back to my own village,"
explained the Onondaga. "For that time I built a hut, and when I had led
her across the door, as our custom was, I scattered seeds upon
her--seeds of the pine tree. Then we sat in our places on either side
the fire, and she made me cake of acorn meal, and we made a vow as we
ate it that we would love one another always.

"We were very happy. I hunted and fished, and the old moose fed in our
meadow. Nukewis used to gather armfuls of grass for him. When we went
back to my wife's village he trotted along in the trail behind us like a
dog. Nukewis wished to go back after her father's Medicine bag, and
being a woman she did not wish to go to my mother without her dower.
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.

[Illustration]

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 nobody 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
Nassau, 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 compass 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 pronounce
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 shore 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 luster 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 shore, 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 shore 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.

[Illustration: "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 nobody 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.

"And after four or five years Ayllon, with the three-plied rope of
pearls under his doublet, came back.

"The Cacica was ready for him. She was really the Chief Woman of
Cofachique,--the Cacique was only her husband,--and she was obeyed as no
ordinary woman," said the Brown Pelican.

"She was not an ordinary woman," said the Snowy Egret, fluffing her
white spray of plumes. "If she so much as looked at you and her glance
caught your eye, then you had to do what she said, whether you liked it
or not. But most of her people liked obeying her, for she was as wise as
she was terrible. That was why she did not kill Lucas de Ayllon at the
pearling place as the Cacique wished her to do. 'If we kill him,' said
the Chief Woman, 'others will come to avenge him. We must send him home
with such a report that no others of his kind will visit this coast
again.' She had everything arranged for that."

The Egret settled to her nest again and the Pelican went on with the
story.

"In the spring of the year Ayllon came loafing up the Florida coast with
two brigantines and a crew of rascally adventurers, looking for slaves
and gold. At least Ayllon said he was looking for slaves, though most of
those he had carried away the first time had either jumped overboard or
refused their food and died. But he had not been willing to tell anybody
about the pearls, and he had to have some sort of excuse for returning
to a place where he couldn't be expected to be welcomed.

"And that was the first surprise he had when he put to shore on the
bluff where the city of Savannah now stands, with four small boats,
every man armed with a gun or a crossbow.

"The Indians, who were fishing between the shoals, received the
Spaniards kindly; sold them fish and fresh fruit for glass beads, and
showed themselves quite willing to guide them in their search for slaves
and gold. Only there was no gold: nothing but a little copper and
stinging swarms of flies, gray clouds of midges and black ooze that
sucked the Spaniards to their thighs, and the clatter of scrub palmetto
leaves on their iron shirts like the sound of wooden swords, as the
Indians wound them in and out of trails that began in swamps and arrived
nowhere. Never once did they come any nearer to the towns than a few
poor fisher huts, and never a pearl showed in any Indian's necklace or
earring. The Chief Woman had arranged for that!

"All this time she sat at Talimeco in her house on the temple mound--"

"Mounds!" interrupted the children both at once. "Were they
Mound-Builders?"

"They built mounds," said the Pelican, "for the Cacique's house and the
God-House, and for burial, with graded ways and embankments. The one at
Talimeco was as tall as three men on horseback, as the Spaniards
discovered later--Soto's men, not Ayllon's. _They_ never came within
sound of the towns nor in sight of the league-long fields of corn nor
the groves of mulberry trees. They lay with their goods spread out along
the beach without any particular order and without any fear of the few
poor Indians they saw.

"That was the way the Chief Woman had arranged it. All the men who came
down to the ships were poorly dressed and the women wrinkled, though she
was the richest Cacica in the country, and had four bearers with feather
fans to accompany her. All this time she sat in the Silences and sent
her thoughts among the Spaniards so that they bickered among themselves,
for they were so greedy for gold that no half-dozen of them would trust
another half-dozen out of their sight. They would lie loafing about the
beaches and all of a sudden anger would run among them like thin fire in
the savannahs, which runs up the sap wood of the pines, winding, and
taking flight from the top like a bird. Then they would stab one another
in their rages, or roast an Indian because he would not tell them where
gold was. For they could not get it out of their heads that there was
gold. They were looking for another Peru.

"Toward the last, Ayllon had to sleep in his ship at night so jealous
his captains were of him. He had a touch of the swamp fever which takes
the heart out of a man, and finally he was obliged to show them the
three-plied rope of pearls to hold them. To just a few of his captains
he showed it, but the Indian boy he had taken to be his servant saw them
fingering it in the ship's cabin and sent word to the Chief Woman."

The sun rose high on the lagoon as the Pelican paused in her story, and
beyond the rookery the children could see blue water and a line of surf,
with the high-pooped Spanish ships rising and falling. Beyond that were
the low shore and the dark wood of pines and the shining leaves of the
palmettoes like a lake spattered with the light--split by their needle
points. They could see the dark bodies of the Indian runners working
their way through it to Talimeco. The Pelican went on with the story.

"'Now it is time,' said the Cacica, and the Cacique's Own--that was a
band of picked fighting men--took down their great shields of woven cane
from the god-house and left Talimeco by night. And from every seacoast
town of Cofachique went bowmen and spearsmen. They would be sitting by
their hearth-fires at evening, and in the morning they would be gone. At
the same time there went a delegation from Talimeco to Lucas de Ayllon
to say that the time of one of the Indian feasts was near, and to invite
him and his men to take part in it. The Spaniards were delighted, for
now they thought they should see some women, and maybe learn about gold.
But though scores of Indians went down, with venison and maize cakes in
baskets, no women went at all, and if the Spaniards had not been three
fourths drunk, that would have warned them.

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