The Trail Book | Page 8

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