The Trail Book by Mary Austin et al

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"'I hate you, Arrumpa,' he said, 'because you have killed my father. I
am too little to kill you for it now, but when I am a man I shall kill
you.' He struck me with his fists. 'Put me down, Man-Killer!'

"So I put him down. What else was there to do? And there was a sensation
in my breast, a sensation as of bending the knees and bowing the
neck--not at all unpleasant--He stood where I placed him, between my
tusks, and one of the hunters, who was a man in authority, called out to
him to come away while they killed me.

"'That you shall not,' said my manling, 'for he has killed my father,
therefore he is mine to kill according to the custom of killing.'

"Then the man was angry.

"'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 god.
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 passed 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
embarrassed 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 grass 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 grass, and the man huts sleeping on the hill, and felt the Dawn's
breath pricking 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 butts 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
gods to keep, and the gods have given to me again!'

"That was the way always with Taku-Wakin, he kept all the god customs of
the people, but he never doubted, when he had found what he wanted to
do, that the gods 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 scraps, 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?'

"'Game or Council,' said Taku-Wakin, 'I sit in my father's place until I
have a Sign from him whom he will have to sit there.'"

"But I don't understand--" began Oliver, looking about the circle of
listening Indians. "His father was dead, wasn't he?"

"What is 'dead'?" said the Lenni-Lenape; "Indians do not know. Our
friends go out of their bodies; where? Into another--or into a beast?
When I was still strapped in my basket my father set me on a bear that
he had killed and prayed that the bear's cunning and strength should
pass into me. Taku-Wakin's people thought that the heart of Long-Hand
might have gone into the Mastodon."

"Why not?" agreed Arrumpa gravely. "I remember that Taku would call me
Father at times, and--if he was very fond of me--Grandfather. But all he
wanted at that tune was to keep Opata from being elected in his father's
place, and Opata, who understood this perfectly, was very angry.

"'It is the custom,' he said, 'when a chief sleeps in the High
Places,'--he meant the hilltops where they left their dead on poles or
tied to the tree branches,--'that we elect another to his place in
the Council.'

"'Also it is a custom,' said Taku-Wakin, 'to bring the token of his
great exploit into Council and quicken the heart by hearing of it. You
have heard, O Chiefs," he said, "that my people had a plan for the good
of the people, and it has come to me in my heart that that plan was
stronger in him than death. For he was a man who finished what he had
begun, and it may be that he is long-handed enough to reach back from
the place where he has gone. And this is a Sign to me, that he has taken
his cut stick, which had the secret of his plan, with him.'

"Taku-Wakin fiddled with the arrows, laying them straight, hardly daring
to look up at Opata, for if the chief had his father's cut stick, now
would be the time that he would show it. Out of the tail of his eye he
could see that the rest of the Council were startled. That was the way
with men. Me they would trap, and take the skin of Saber-Tooth to wrap
their cubs in, but at the hint of a Sign, or an old custom slighted,
they would grow suddenly afraid. Then Taku looked up and saw Opata
stroking his face with his hand to hide what he was thinking. He was no
fool, and he saw that if the election was pressed, Taku-Wakin, boy as he
was, would sit in his father's place because of the five arrows.
Taku-Wakin stood up and stretched out his hand to the Council.

"'Is it agreed, O Chiefs, that you keep my father's place until there is
a Sign?'--and a deep _Hu-huh_ ran all about the circle. It was sign
enough for them that the son of Long-Hand played unhurt with arrows that
had been given to the gods. Taku stretched his hand to Opata, 'Is it
agreed, O Chief?'

"'So long as the tribe comes to no harm,' said Opata, making the best of
a bad business. 'It shall be kept until Long-Hand or his Talking Rod
comes back to us.'

"'And,' said Taku-Wakin to me, 'whether Opata or I first sits in it,
depends on which one of us can first produce a Sign.'"

[Illustration: TAKU AND ARRUMPA.]

IV

THE SECOND PART OF THE MASTODON STORY CONCERNING THE TRAIL TO THE SEA
AND THE TALKING STICK OF TAKU-WAKIN

"It was the Talking Stick of his father that Taku-Wakin wanted," said
Arrumpa. "He still thought Opata might have it, for every now and then
Taku would catch him coming back with marsh mud on his moccasins. That
was how I began to understand that the Great Plan was really a plan to
find a way _through_ the marsh to the sea on the other side of it.

"'Opata has the Stick,' said Taku, 'but it will not talk to him;
therefore he goes, as my father did, when the waters are low and the
hummocks of hard ground stand up, to find a safe way for the tribe to
follow. But my father had worked as far as the Grass Flats and beyond
them, to a place of islands.'

"'Squidgy Islands,' I told him. 'The Grass-Eaters go there to drop their
calves every season.' Taku kicked me behind the ears.

"'Said I not you were a beast of a bad heart!' he scolded. But how
should I know he would care to hear about a lot of silly Mammoths.
'Also,' he said, 'you are my Medicine. You shall find me the trail of
the Talking Stick, and I, Taku, son of Long-Hand, shall lead
the people.'

"'In six moons,' I told him, 'the Grass-Eaters go to the Islands to
calve--'

"'In which time,' said Taku, 'the chiefs will have quarreled six times,
and Opata will have eaten me. Drive them, Arrumpa, drive them!'

"Umph, uh-ump!" chuckled the old beast reminiscently. "We drove; we
drove. What else was there to do? Taku-Wakin was my man. Besides, it was
great fun. One-Tusk helped me. He was one of our bachelor herd who had
lost a tusk in his first fight, which turned out greatly to his
advantage. He would come sidling up to a refractory young cow with his
eyes twinkling, and before anybody suspected he could give such a prod
with his one tusk as sent her squealing.... But that came afterward. The
Mammoth herd that fed on our edge of the Great Swamp was led by a
wrinkled old cow, wise beyond belief. Scrag we called her. She would
take the herd in to the bedding-ground by the river, to a landing-point
on the opposite side, never twice the same, and drift noiselessly
through the canebrake, choosing blowy hours when the swish of cane over
woolly backs was like the run of the wind. Days when the marsh would be
full of tapirs wallowing and wild pig rootling and fighting, there might
be hundreds feeding within sound of you and not a hint of it except the
occasional _toot-toot_ of some silly cow calling for Scrag, or a young
bull blowing water.

"They bedded at the Grass Flats, but until Scrag herself had a mind to
take the trail to the Squidgy Islands, there was nobody but Saber-Tooth
could persuade her.

"'Then Saber-Tooth shall help us,' said my man.

"Not for nothing was he called Taku-Wakin, which means 'The Wonderful.'
He brought a tiger cub's skin of his father's killing, dried stiff and
sewed up with small stones inside it. At one end there was a thong with
a loop in it, and it smelled of tiger. I could see the tip of One-Tusk's
trunk go up with a start every time he winded it. There was a curled
moon high up in the air like a feather, and a moon-white tusk glinting
here and there, where the herds drifted across the flats. There was no
trouble about our going among them so long as Scrag did not wind us.
_They_ claimed to be kin to us, and they cared nothing for Man even when
they smelled him. We came sidling up to a nervous young cow, and Taku
dropped from my neck long enough to slip the thong over a hind foot as
she lifted it. The thong was wet at first and scarcely touched her.
Presently it tightened. Then the cow shook her foot to free it and the
skin rattled. She squealed nervously and started out to find Scrag, who
was feeding on the far side of the hummock, and at every step the
tiger-skin rattled and bounced against her. Eyes winked red with alarm
and trunks came lifting out of the tall grass like serpents. One-Tusk
moved silently, prod-prodding; we could hear the click of ivory and the
bunting of shoulder against shoulder. Then some silly cow had a whiff of
the skin that bounded along in their tracks like a cat, and raised the
cry of 'Tiger! Tiger!' Far on the side from us, in the direction of the
Squidgy Islands, Scrag trumpeted, followed by frantic splashing as the
frightened herd plunged into the reed-beds. Taku slipped from my neck,
shaking with laughter.

"'Follow, follow,' he said; 'I go to bring up the people.'

"It was two days before Scrag stopped running.

"From the Grass Flats on to the Islands it was all one reed-bed where
the water gathered into runnels between hummocks of rotten rushes, where
no trail would lie and any false step might plunge you into black bog to
the shoulder. About halfway we found the tiger-skin tramped into the
mire, but as soon as we struck the Islands I turned back, for I was in
need of good oak browse, and I wished to find out what had become of
Taku-Wakin. It was not until one evening when I had come well up into
the hills for a taste of fir, that I saw him, black against the sun with
the tribe behind him. The Five Chiefs walked each in front of his own
village, except that Taku-Wakin's own walked after Opata, and there were
two of the Turtle clan, each with his own head man, and two under
Apunkewis. Before all walked Taku-Wakin holding a peeled stick upright
and seeing the end of the trail, but not what lay close in front of him.
He did not even see me as I slipped around the procession and left a wet
trail for him to follow.

"That was how we crossed to the Islands, village by village, with
Taku-Wakin close on my trail, which was the trail of the Grass-Eaters.
They swam the sloughs with their children on their shoulders, and made
rafts of reeds to push their food bundles over. By night they camped on
the hummocks and built fires that burned for days in the thick litter of
reeds. Red reflections glanced like fishes along the water. Then there
would be the drums and the--the thunder-twirler--"

"But what kept him so long and how did he persuade them?" Dorcas Jane
squirmed with curiosity.

"He'd been a long time working out the trail through the canebrake,"
said Arrumpa, "making a Talking Stick as his father had taught him; one
ring for a day's journey, one straight mark for so many man's paces;
notches for turns. When he could not remember his father's marks he made
up others. When he came to his village again he found they had all gone
over to Opata's. Apunkewis, who had the two villages under Black Rock
and was a friend of Long-Hand, told him that there would be a Sign.

"'There will,' said Taku-Wakin, 'but I shall bring it.' He knew that
Opata meant mischief, but he could not guess what. All the way to
Opata's his thought went round and round like a fire-stick in the
hearth-hole. When he heard the drums he flared up like a spark in the
tinder. Earlier in the evening there had been a Big Eating at Opata's,
and now the men were dancing.

"'_Eyah, eyah!_' they sang.

"Taku-Wakin whirled like a spark into the ring. '_Eyah, eyah!_' he
shouted,--

"'Great are the people
They have found a sign,
The sign of the Talking Rod!
Eyah! My people!'

"He planted it full in the firelight where it rocked and beckoned.
'_Eyah_, the rod is calling,' he sang.

"The moment he had sight of Opata's face he knew that whatever the chief
had meant to do, he did not have his father's Stick. Taku caught up his
own and twirled it, and finally he hid it under his coat, for if any one
had handled it he could have seen that this was not the Stick of
Long-Hand, but fresh-peeled that season. But because Opata wanted the
Stick of Long-Hand, he thought any stick of Taku's must be the one he
wanted. And what Opata thought, the rest of the tribe thought also. So
they rose up by clans and villages and followed after the Sign. That was
how we came to the Squidgy Islands. There were willows there and young
alders and bare knuckles of rock holding up the land.

"Beyond that the Swamp began; the water gathered itself into bayous that
went slinking, wolflike, between the trees, or rose like a wolf through
the earth and stole it from under your very foot. It doubled into black
lagoons to doze, and young snakes coiled on the lily-pads, so that when
the sun warmed them you could hear the shi-shisi-ss like a wind rising.
Also by night there would be greenish lights that followed the trails
for a while and went out suddenly in whistling noises. Now and then in
broad day the Swamp would fall asleep. There would be the plop of
turtles falling into the creek and the slither of alligators in the mud,
and all of a sudden not a ripple would start, and between the clacking
of one reed and another would come the soundless lift and stir of the
Swamp snoring. Then the hair on your neck would rise, and some man
caught walking alone in it would go screaming mad with fear.

"Six moons we had to stay in that place, for Scrag had hidden the herd
so cleverly that it was not until the week-old calves began to squeak
for their mothers that we found them. And from the time they were able
to run under their mother's bodies, One-Tusk and I kept watch and watch
to see that they did not break back to the Squidgy Islands. It was
necessary for Taku-Wakin's plan that they should go out on the other
side where there was good land between the Swamp and the Sea, not
claimed by the Kooskooski. We learned to eat grass that summer and
squushy reeds with no strength in them--did I say that all the
Grass-Eaters were pot-bellied? Also I had to reason with One-Tusk, who
had not loved a man, and found that the Swamp bored him. By this time,
too, Scrag knew what we were after; she covered her trail and crossed it
as many times as a rabbit. Then, just as we thought we had it, the wolf
water came and gnawed the trail in two.

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