The Trail Book by Mary Austin et al

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"'Town is a trade-maker,' he said; 'men who trade much for things, will
also trade for honor.'

"'The Lenni-Lenape carry their honor in their hands,' said Ongyatasse,
'but the Tallegewi carry theirs in their forehead.'

"He meant," said the Mound-Builder, turning to the children, "that the
Lenni-Lenape fought for what they held most dear, and the Tallegewi
schemed and plotted for it. That was as we were taught. With us, the
hand is not lifted until the head has spoken. But as it turned out,
between Tallegewi and Lenape, the fighters had the best of it."

He sighed, making the salutation to the dead as he looked off, across
the burial-grounds, to the crumbling heap of the god-house.

"But I don't understand," said Dorcas; "were Ongyatasse and White Quiver
friends or enemies?"

"They were two foes who loved one another, and though their tribes fell
into long and bloody war, between these two there was highness and, at
the end, most wonderful kindness. The first time that we got Ongyatasse
to his feet and he found that his knee, though feeble, was as good as
ever, he said to White Quiver, leaning on his shoulder,--

"'Concerning the call to Council, there was more to it than was written
on the scroll, the meaning of which was hidden from me who carried it.'

"'Which is no news to me,' said the Lenni-Lenape; 'also,' he said, 'the
message was arranged beforehand, for it required no answer.'

"I asked him how he knew that, and he mocked at me.

"'Any time these five days you could have gone forward with the answer
had it been important for you to get back to Cool Waters!'

"That was true. I could have left Ongyatasse and gone on alone, but
nothing that had happened so far had made us think that we must get back
quickly. White Quiver asked us one day what reason Well-Praised had
given for requiring that the Lenni-Lenape should pass through the
country with not more than twenty fighting men in the party. To save the
game, we told him, which seemed to us reasonable; though I think from
that hour we began to feel that the Tallegewi, with all their walled
towns and monuments, had been put somehow in the wrong by the wild
tribes of Shinaki.

"We stayed on in the ravine, waiting on Ongyatasse's knee, until we saw
the new rim of the Halting Moon curled up like a feather. The leaves of
the buckeye turned clear yellow and the first flock of wild geese went
over. We waited one more day for White Quiver to show us a short cut to
the Maumee Trail, and just when we had given him up, we were aware of a
strange Lenape in warpaint moving among the shadows. He stood off from
us with his arms folded and his face was as bleak as a winter-bitten wood.

"'Wash the lie from your mouth,' he said, 'and follow.'

"Without a word he turned and began to move from us through the smoky
light with which the wood was filling. His head was cropped for
war--that was why we did not know him--and along the shoulder he turned
toward us was the long scrape of a spear-point. That was why we
followed, saying nothing. Toward daylight the lame knee began to give
trouble. White Quiver came back and put his shoulder under Ongyatasse's,
so we moved forward, wordlessly. Birds awoke in the woods, and hoarfrost
lay white on the crisped grasses.

"On a headland from which the lake glinted white as a blade of flint on
the horizon, we waited the sunrise. Smoke arose, from Wabashiki, from
the direction of the Maumee settlements, from the lake shore towns; tall
plumes of smoke shook and threatened. Curtly, while we ate, White Quiver
told us what had happened; how the Tallegewi, in violation of the
treaty, had fallen suddenly on scattered bands of the Lenni-Lenape and
all but exterminated them. The Tallegewi said that it was because they
had discovered that the Lenni-Lenape had plotted to fall upon our towns,
as soon as the corn was harvested, and take them. But White Quiver
thought that the whole thing was a plan of Well-Praised from the
beginning. He had been afraid to refuse passage to the Lenape, on
account of their great numbers, and had arranged to have them broken up
in small parties so that they could be dealt with separately."

"And which was it?" Oliver wished to know.

"It was a thousand years ago," said the Mound-Builder. "Who remembers?
But we were ashamed, my friend and I, for we understood now that the
secret meaning of our message about the Horned Heads had been that the
Tallegewi should fall upon the Lenape wherever they found them. You
remember that it was part of the question and answer that they 'came
into the fields and ate up the harvest.'

"There might have been a plot, but, on the other hand, we knew that the
painted scroll had been a blind to make the Lenni-Lenape think that the
Tallegewi would do nothing until they had taken counsel. But we had
carried a war message with peace upon our mouths and we were ashamed
before White Quiver. We had talked much highness with him, and besides,
we loved him. As it turned out we were not wrong in thinking he loved
us. As we stood making out the points of direction for the trail,
Ongyatasse's knee gave under him, and as White Quiver put out his arm
without thinking, a tremor passed over them. They stood so leaning each
on each for a moment. 'Your trail lies thus ... and thus ...' said the
Lenape, 'but I do not know what you will find at the end of it.' Then he
loosed his arm from my friend's shoulder, took a step back, and the
forest closed about him.

"We were two days more on the trail, though we did not go directly to
Cool Waters. Some men of the Painted Turtles that we met, told us the
fight had passed from the neighborhood of the towns and gathered at Bent
Bar Crossing. Our fathers were both there, which we made an excuse for
joining them. At several places we saw evidences of fighting. All the
bands of Lenni-Lenape that were not too far in our territory had come
hurrying back toward Fish River, and other bands, as the rumor of
fighting spread, came down out of Shinaki like buzzards to a carcass.
From Cool Waters to Namae-sippu, the Dark Wood was full of war-cries and
groaning. At Fish River the Tallegewi fell in hundreds ... there is a
mound there ... at Bent Bar the Lenni-Lenape held the ford, keeping a
passage open for flying bands that were pressed up from the south by the
Painted Turtles. Ongyatasse went about getting together his old band
from the Three Towns, fretting because we were not allowed to take the
front of the battle.

"Three days the fight raged about the crossing. The Lenni-Lenape were
the better bowmen; their long arrows carried heavier points. Some that I
found in the breasts of my friends, I had made, and it made my own heart
hot within me. The third day, men from the farther lake towns came up
the river in their canoes, and the Lenape, afraid of being cut off from
their friends in the Dark Wood, broke across the river. As soon as they
began to go, our young men, who feared the fight would be over without
them, could not be held back. Ongyatasse at our head, we plunged into
the river after them.

"Even in flight the Lenni-Lenape were most glorious fighters. They dived
among the canoes to hack holes in the bottoms, and rising from under the
sides they pulled the paddlers bodily into the river. We were mad with
our first fight, we youngsters, for we let them lead us up over the bank
and straight into ambush. We were the Young-Men-Who-Never-Turned-Back.

"That was a true name for many of us," said the Mound-Builder. "I
remember Ongyatasse's shrill eagle cry above the '_G'we! G'we_!' of the
Lenni-Lenape, and the next thing I knew I was struggling in the river,
bleeding freely from a knife wound, and somebody was pulling me into a
canoe and safety."

"And Ongyatasse--?" The children looked at the low mound between the
Council Place and the God-House.

The Mound-Builder nodded.

"We put our spears together to make a tent over him before the earth was
piled," he said, "and it was good to be able to do even so much as that
for him. For we thought at first we should never find him. He was not on
the river, nor in our side of the Dark Wood, and the elders would not
permit us to go across in search of him. But at daylight the gatherers
of the dead saw something moving from under the mist that hid the
opposite bank of the river. We waited, arrow on bowstring, not knowing
if it were one of our own coming back to us or a Lenape asking for
parley. But as it drew near we saw it was a cropped head, and he towed a
dead Tallega by the hair. Ripples that spread out from his quiet wake
took the sun, and the measured dip of the swimmer's arm was no louder
than the whig of the cooter that paddled in the shallows.

"It had been a true word that Ongyatasse had given his life and his luck
to White Quiver; the Lenape had done his best to give them back again.
As he came ashore with the stiffened form, we saw him take the white
deer amulet from his own neck and fasten it around the neck of
Ongyatasse. Then, disdaining even to make the Peace sign for his own
safe returning, he plunged into the river again, swimming steadily
without haste until the fog hid him."

The Mound-Builder stood up, wrapping his feather mantle about him and
began to move down the slope of the Town Mound, the children following.
There were ever so many things they wished to hear about, which they
hoped he might be going to tell them, but halfway down he turned and
pointed. Over south and east a thin blue film of smoke rose up straight
from the dark forest.

"That's for you, I think. Your friend, the Onondaga, is signaling you;
he knows the end of the story."

Taking hands, the children ran straight in the direction of the smoke
signal, along the trail which opened before them.

[Illustration]

X

THE MAKING OF A SHAMAN: A TELLING OF THE IROQUOIS TRAIL, BY THE ONONDAGA

Down the Mound-Builder's graded way the children ran looking for the
Onondaga. Like all the trail in the Museum Country it covered a vast
tract of country in a very little while, so that it was no time at all
before they came out among high, pine-covered swells, that broke along
the watercourses into knuckly granite headlands. From one of these,
steady puffs of smoke arose, and a moment later they could make out the
figure of an Indian turning his head from side to side as he searched
the surrounding country with the look of eagles. They knew him at once,
by the Medicine bundle at his belt and the slanting Iroquois feather,
for their friend the Onondaga.

"I was looking for you by the lake shore trail," he explained as Oliver
and Dorcas Jane climbed up to him. "You must have come by the
Musking-ham-Mahoning; it drops into the Trade Trail of the Iroquois
yonder,"--he pointed south and east,--"the Great Trail, from the
Mohican-ittuck to the House of Thunder." He meant the Hudson River and
the Falls of Niagara. "Even at our village, which was at the head of the
lake here, we could hear the Young Thunders, shouting from behind the
falls," he told them.

A crooked lake lay below them like a splinter of broken glass between
the headlands. From the far end of it the children could see smoke
rising. "We used to signal our village from here when we went on the
war-trail," said the Onondaga; "we would cut our mark on a tree as we
went out, and as we came back we added the war count. I was looking for
an old score of mine to-day."

"Had it anything to do with the Mound-Builders?" Dorcas wished to know.
"He said you knew the end of that story."

The Onondaga shook his head.

"That was a hundred years before my time, and is a Telling of the
Lenni-Lenape. In the Red Score it is written, the Red Score of the
Lenni-Lenape. When my home was in the village there, the Five Nations
held all the country between the lakes and the Mohican-ittuck. But there
were many small friendly tribes along the borders, Algonquian mostly."

He squatted on his heels beside the fire and felt in his belt for the
pipe and tobacco pouch without which no Telling proceeds properly.

"In my youth," said the Onondaga, "I was very unhappy because I had no
Vision. When my time came I walked in the forest and ate nothing, but
the Mystery would not speak to me. Nine days I walked fasting, and then
my father came to find me under a pine tree, with my eyes sunk in my
head and my ribs like a basket. But because I was ashamed I told him my
Mystery was something that could not be talked about, and so I told
the Shaman.

"My father was pleased because he thought it meant that I was to be a
very great Shaman myself, and the other boys envied me. But in my heart
I was uneasy. I did not know what to make of my life because the Holder
of the Heavens had not revealed himself to me. To one of my friends he
had appeared as an eagle, which meant that he was to be a warrior, keen
and victorious; and to another as a fox, so that he studied cunning; but
without any vision I did not know what to make of myself. My heart was
slack as a wetted bowstring. My father reproached me.

"'The old women had smoke in their eyes,' he said; 'they told me I had a
son, now I see it is a woman child.'

"My mother was kinder. 'Tell me,' she said, 'what evil dream unknots the
cords of your heart?'

"So at last I told her.

"My mother was a wise woman. 'To a dog or a child,' she said, 'one
speaks the first word on the lips, but before a great Shaman one
considers carefully. What is a year of your life to the Holder of the
Heavens? Go into the forest and wait until his message is ripe for you.'
She was a wise woman.

"So I put aside my bow and quiver, and with them all desire of meat and
all thought of killing. With my tomahawk I cut a mark in that chestnut
yonder and buried my weapon at the foot of it. I had my knife, my pipe,
and my fire-stick. Also I felt happy and important because my mother had
made me believe that the Holder of the Heavens thought well of me. I was
giving him a year in which to tell me what to do with my life.

"I turned east, for, I said, from the east light comes. It was an old
trail even in those days. It follows the watershed from the lake to
Oneida, and clears the Mohawk Valley northward. It was the Moon of
Tender Leaves when I set out, and by the time nuts began to ripen I had
come to the lowest hills of the Adirondacks.

"Sometimes I met hunting-parties or women gathering berries, and bought
corn and beans from them, but for the most part I lived on seeds and
roots and wild apples.

"By the time I had been a month or two without killing, the smell of
meat left me. Rabbits ran into my hands, and the mink, stealing along
the edge of the marsh to look for frogs, did not start from me. Deer
came at night to feed on the lily buds on the lake borders. They would
come stealing among the alders and swim far out to soak their coats.
When they had made themselves mosquito-proof, they would come back to
the lily beds and I would swim among them stilly, steering by the red
reflection of my camp-fire in their eyes. When my thought that was not
the thought of killing touched them, they would snort a little and
return to the munching of lilies, and the trout would rise in bubbly
rings under my arms as I floated. But though I was a brother to all the
Earth, the Holder of the Heavens would not speak to me.

"Sometimes, when I had floated half the night between the hollow sky of
stars and its hollow reflection, the Vision seemed to gather on the
surface of the water. It would take shape and turn to the flash of a
loon's wet wing in the dawning, Or I would sit still in the woods until
my thought was as a tree, and the squirrels would take me for a tree and
run over me. Then there would come a strange stir, and the creeping of
my flesh along my spine until the Forest seemed about to speak ... and
suddenly a twig would snap or a jay squawk, and I would be I again, and
the tree a tree....

"It was the first quarter of the Moon of Falling Leaves," said the
Onondaga filling his pipe again and taking a fresh start on his story.
"There was a feel in the air that comes before the snow, but I was very
happy in my camp by a singing creek far up on the Adirondacks, and kept
putting off moving the camp from day to day. And one evening when I came
in from gathering acorns, I discovered that I had had a visitor. Mush of
acorn meal which I had left in my pot had been eaten. That is right, of
course, if the visitor is hungry; but this one had wiped out his tracks
with a leafy bough, which looked like trickery.

"It came into my mind that it might have been one of the Gahonga, the
spirits that dwell in rocks and rivers and make the season fruitful."

"Oh!" cried Dorcas, "Indian fairies! Did you have those?"

"There are spirits in all things," said the Onondaga gravely. "There are
Odowas, who live in the underworld and keep back the evil airs that
bring sickness. You can see the bare places under the pines where they
have their dancing-places. And there are the Gandaiyah who loose wild
things from the traps and bring dew on the strawberry blossoms. But all
these are friendly to man. So I cooked another pot of food and lay down
in my blanket. I sleep as light as a wild thing myself. In the middle of
the night I was wakened by the sound of eating. Presently I heard
something scrape the bottom of the pot, and though I was afraid, I could
not bear to have man or spirit go from my camp hungry. So I spoke to
the sound.

"'There is food hanging in the tree,' I said. I had hung it up to keep
the ants from it. But as soon as I finished speaking I heard the Thing
creeping away. In the morning I found it had left the track of one small
torn moccasin and a strange misshapen lump. It came up from and
disappeared into the creek, so I was sure it must have been a Gahonga.
But that evening as I sat by my fire I was aware of it behind me. No, I
heard nothing; I felt the thought of that creature touching my thought.
Without looking round I said, 'What is mine is yours, brother.' Then I
laid dry wood on the fire, and getting up I walked away without looking
back. But when I was out of the circle of light I looked and I saw the
Thing come out of the brush and warm its hands.

"Then I knew that it was human, so I dropped my blanket over it from
behind and it lay without moving. I thought I had killed it, but when I
lifted the blanket I saw that it was a girl, and she was all but dead
with fright. She lay looking at me like a deer that I had shot, waiting
for me to plunge in the knife. It is a shame to any man to have a girl
look at him as that one looked at me. I made the sign of friendship and
set food before her, and water in a cup of bark. Then I saw what had
made the clumsy track; it was her foot which she had cut on the rocks
and bound up with strips of bark. Also she was sick with fright and
starvation.

"For two days she lay on my bed and ate what I gave her and looked at me
as a trapped thing looks at the owner of the trap. I tried her with all
the dialects I knew, and even with a few words I had picked up from a
summer camp of Wabaniki. I had met them a week or two before at
Owenunga, at the foot of the mountains.

"She put her hand over her mouth and looked sideways to find a way out
of the trap.

"I was sorry for her, but she was a great nuisance. I was so busy
getting food for her that I had no time to listen for the Holder of the
Heavens, and besides, there was a thickening of the air, what we call
the Breath of the Great Moose, which comes before a storm. If we did not
wish to be snowed in, we had to get down out of the mountain, and on
account of her injured foot we had to go slowly.

"I had it in mind to take her to the camp of the Wabaniki at Owenunga,
but when she found out where we were going she tried to run away. After
that I carried her, for the cut in her foot opened and bled.

"She lay in my arms like a hurt fawn, but what could I do? There was a
tent of cloud all across the Adirondack, and besides, it is not proper
for a young girl to be alone in the woods with a strange man," said the
Onondaga, but he smiled to himself as he said it.

"It was supper-time when we came to Crooked Water. There was a smell of
cooking, and the people gathering between the huts.

"There was peace between the Five Nations and the Wabaniki, so I walked
boldly into the circle of summer huts and put the girl down, while I
made the stranger's sign for food and lodging. But while my hand was
still in the air, there was a shout and a murmur and the women began
snatching their children back. I could see them huddling together like
buffalo cows when their calves are tender, and the men pushing to the
front with caught-up weapons in their hands.

"I held up my own to show that they were weaponless.

"'I want nothing but food and shelter for this poor girl,' I said. I had
let her go in order to make the sign language, for I had but a few words
of their tongue. She crouched at my feet covering her face with her long
hair. The people stood off without answering, and somebody raised a cry
for Waba-mooin. It was tossed about from mouth to mouth until it reached
the principal hut, and presently a man came swaggering out in the dress
of a Medicine Man. He was older than I, but he was also fat, and for all
his Shaman's dress I was not frightened. I knew by the way the girl
stopped crying that she both knew and feared him.

"The moment Waba-mooin saw her he turned black as a thunderhead. He
scattered words as a man scatters seeds with his hand. I was too far to
hear him, but the people broke out with a shower of sticks and stones.
At that the girl sprang up and spread her arms between me and the
people, crying something in her own tongue, but a stone struck her on
the point of the shoulder. She would have dropped, but I caught her, I
held her in my arms and looked across at the angry villagers and
Waba-mooin. Suddenly power came upon me....

"It is something all Indian," said the Onon-daga,--"something White Men
do not understand. It is Magic Medicine, the power of the Shaman, the
power of my thought meeting the evil thought of the Wabaniki and turning
it back as a buffalo shield turns arrows. I gathered up the girl and
walked away from that place slowly as becomes a Shaman. No more stones
struck me; the arrow of Waba-mooin went past me and stuck in an oak. My
power was upon me.

"I must have walked half the night, hearing the drums at Crooked Water
scaring away evil influences. I would feel the girl warm and soft in my
arms as a fawn, and then after a time she would seem to be a part of me.
The trail found itself under my feet; I was not in the least wearied.
The girl was asleep when I laid her down, but toward morning she woke,
and the moment I looked in her eyes, I knew that whatever they had
stoned her for at Owenunga, her eyes were friendly.

"'_M'toulin_,' she said, which is the word in her language for Shaman,
'what will you do with me?'

"There was nothing I could do but take her to my mother as quickly as
possible. There was a wilderness of hills to cross before we struck the
trail through Mohawk Valley. That afternoon the snow began to fall in
great dry flakes, thickening steadily. The girl walked when she could,
but most of the time I carried her. I had the power of a Shaman, though
the Holder of the Heavens had not yet spoken to me.

"We pushed to the top of the range before resting, and all night we
could hear the click and crash of deer and moose going down before the
snow. All the next day there was one old bull moose kept just ahead of
us. We knew he was old because of his size and his being alone. Two or
three times we passed other bulls with two or three cows and their
calves of that season yarding among the young spruce, but the old bull
kept on steadily down the mountain. His years had made him weather-wise.
The third day the wind shifted the snow, and we saw him on the round
crown of a hill below us, tracking."

The Onondaga let his pipe go out while he explained the winter habits of
moose.

"When the snow is too deep for yarding," he said, "they look for the
lower hills that have been burnt over, so that the growth is young and
tender. When the snow is soft, after a thaw, they will track steadily
back and forth until the hill is laced with paths. They will work as
long as the thaw lasts, pushing the soft snow with their shoulders to
release the young pine and the birches. Then, when the snow crusts, they
can browse all along the paths for weeks, tunneling far under.

"We saw our bull the last afternoon as we came down from the cloud cap,
and then the white blast cut us off and we had only his trail to follow.
When we came to the hill we could still hear him thrashing about in his
trails, so I drew down the boughs of a hemlock and made us a shelter and
a fire. For two days more the storm held, with cold wind and driven
snow. About the middle of the second day I heard a heavy breathing above
our hut, and presently the head of the moose came through the hemlock
thatch, and his eyes were the eyes of a brother. So I knew my thought
was still good, and I made room for him in the warmth of the hut. He
moved out once or twice to feed, and I crept after him to gather grass
seeds and whatever could be found that the girl could eat. We had had
nothing much since leaving the camp at Crooked Water.

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