The Trail Book | Page 4

a deep, continuous
murmur from the cows like the voice of the earth talking to itself at
twilight.
"Come," said the old bull, "we must be moving."
"But what is that?" said Dorcas Jane, as a new sound came from the
direction of the river, a long chant stretching itself like a snake across
the prairie, and as they listened there were words that lifted and fell
with an odd little pony joggle.
"That is the Pawnees, singing their travel song," said the Buffalo Chief.
And as he spoke they could see the eagle bonnets of the tribesmen
coming up the hollow, every man mounted, with his round shield and
the point of his lance tilted forward. After them came the women on the
pack-ponies with the goods, and the children stowed on the travoises of
lodge-poles that trailed from the ponies' withers.

"Ha-ah," said the old bull. "One has laid his ear to the ground in their
lodges and has heard the earth tremble with the passing of the Buffalo
People."
"But where do they go?" said Dorcas.
"They follow the herds," said the old bull, "for the herds are their food
and their clothes and their housing. It is the Way Things Are that the
Buffalo People should make the trails and men should ride in them.
They go up along the watersheds where the floods cannot mire, where
the snow is lightest, and there are the best lookouts."
"And, also, there is the easiest going," said a new voice with a snarly
running whine in it. It came from a small gray beast with pointed ears
and a bushy tail, and the smut-tipped nose that all coyotes have had
since their very first father blacked himself bringing fire to Man from
the Burning Mountain. He had come up very softly at the heels of the
Buffalo Chief, who wheeled suddenly and blew steam from his nostrils.
"That," he said, "is because of the calves. It is not because a buffalo
cannot go anywhere it pleases him; down ravines where a horse would
stumble and up cliffs where even you, O Smut Nose, cannot follow."
"True, Great Chief," said the Coyote, "but I seem to remember trails
that led through the snow to very desirable places."
This was not altogether kind, for it is well known that it is only when
snow has lain long enough on the ground to pack and have a hard
coating of ice, that the buffaloes dare trust themselves upon it. When it
is new-fallen and soft they flounder about helplessly until they die of
starvation, and the wolves pull them down, or the Indians come and kill
them. But the old bull had the privilege which belongs to greatness, of
not being obliged to answer impertinent things that were said to him.
He went on just as if nothing had interrupted, telling how the buffalo
trails had found the mountain passes and how they were rutted deep
into the earth by the migrating herds.
"I have heard," he said, "that when the Pale Faces came into the

country they found no better roads anywhere than the buffalo traces--"
"Also," purred Moke-icha, "I have heard that they found trails through
lands where no buffalo had been before them." Moke-icha, the Puma,
lay on a brown boulder that matched so perfectly with her watered coat
that if it had not been for the ruffling of the wind on her short fur and
the twitchings of her tail, the children might not have discovered her.
"Look," she said, stretching out one of her great pads toward the south,
where the trail ran thin and white across a puma-colored land, streaked
with black lava and purple shadow. Far at the other end it lifted in red,
wall-sided buttes where the homes of the Cliff People stuck like
honeycombs in the wind-scoured hollows.
"Now I recall a trail in that country," said Moke-icha, "that was older
than the oldest father's father of them could remember. Four times a
year the People of the Cliffs went down on it to the Sacred Water, and
came back with bags of salt on their shoulders."
Even as she spoke they could see the people coming out of the Cliff
dwellings and the priests going into the kivas preparing for the journey.
That was how it was; when any animal spoke of the country he knew
best, that was what the children saw. And yet all the time there was the
beginning of the buffalo trail in front of them, and around them, drawn
there by that something of himself which every man puts into the work
of his hands, the listening tribesmen. One of these spoke now in answer
to Moke-icha.
"Also in my part of the country," he said, "long before