Northern Lights | Page 3

that of Swift
Wing, and behind the silent watchfulness of Breaking Rock, there was
a thought which must ever come when a white man mates with an

Indian maid, without priest or preacher, or writing, or book, or bond.
Yet four years had gone; and all the tribe, and all who came and went,
half-breeds, traders, and other tribes, remarked how happy was the
white man with his Indian wife. They never saw anything but light in
the eyes of Mitiahwe, nor did the old women of the tribe who scanned
her face as she came and went, and watched and waited too for what
never came--not even after four years.
Mitiahwe had been so happy that she had not really missed what never
came; though the desire to have something in her arms which was part
of them both had flushed up in her veins at times, and made her restless
till her man had come home again. Then she had forgotten the unseen
for the seen, and was happy that they two were alone together--that was
the joy of it all, so much alone together; for Swift Wing did not live
with them, and, like Breaking Rock, she watched her daughter's life,
standing afar off, since it was the unwritten law of the tribe that the
wife's mother must not cross the path or enter the home of her
daughter's husband. But at last Dingan had broken through this custom,
and insisted that Swift Wing should be with her daughter when he was
away from home, as now on this wonderful autumn morning, when
Mitiahwe had been singing to the Sun, to which she prayed for her man
and for everlasting days with him.
She had spoken angrily but now, because her soul sharply resented the
challenge to her happiness which her mother had been making. It was
her own eyes that refused to see the cloud, which the sage and bereaved
woman had seen and conveyed in images and figures of speech natural
to the Indian mind.
"Hai-yai," she said now, with a strange touching sigh breathing in the
words, "you are right, my mother, and a dream is a dream; also, if it be
dreamt three times, then is it to be followed, and it is true. You have
lived long, and your dreams are of the Sun and the Spirit." She shook a
little as she laid her hand on a buckskin coat of her man hanging by the
lodge-door; then she steadied herself again, and gazed earnestly into
her mother's eyes. "Have all your dreams come true, my mother?" she
asked with a hungering heart. "There was the dream that came out of
the dark five times, when your father went against the Crees, and was
wounded, and crawled away into the hills, and all our warriors
fled--they were but a handful, and the Crees like a young forest in

number! I went with my dream, and found him after many days, and it
was after that you were born, my youngest and my last. There was
also"--her eyes almost closed, and the needle and thread she held lay
still in her lap--"when two of your brothers were killed in the drive of
the buffalo. Did I not see it all in my dream, and follow after them to
take them to my heart? And when your sister was carried off, was it not
my dream which saw the trail, so that we brought her back again to die
in peace, her eyes seeing the Lodge whither she was going, open to her,
and the Sun, the Father, giving her light and promise--for she had
wounded herself to die that the thief who stole her should leave her to
herself. Behold, my daughter, these dreams have I had, and others; and
I have lived long and have seen the bright day break into storm, and the
herds flee into the far hills where none could follow, and hunger come,
and--"
"Hai-yo, see, the birds flying south," said the girl with a gesture
towards the cloudless sky. "Never since I lived have they gone south so
soon." Again she shuddered slightly, then she spoke slowly: "I also
have dreamed, and I will follow my dream. I dreamed"--she knelt down
beside her mother, and rested her hands in her mother's lap--"I dreamed
that there was a wall of hills dark and heavy and far away, and that
whenever my eyes looked at them they burned with tears; and yet I
looked and looked, till my heart was like lead in my breast; and I
turned from them to the rivers and the plains that I loved. But a voice
kept calling to me, 'Come, come! Beyond the hills is a happy land. The
trail is hard, and your