The Trail Book | Page 5

greenish slate which he carried, the handle of which was tasseled with turkey beards and tiny tails of ermine. He returned the children's stare in the friendliest possible fashion, twirling his banner stone as a policeman does his night stick.
"Were you? Mound-Builders, you know?" questioned Oliver.
"You could call us that. We called ourselves Tallegewi, and our trails were old before the buffalo had crossed east of the Missi-Sippu, the Father of all Rivers. Then the country was full of the horned people, thick as flies in the Moon of Stopped Waters." As he spoke, he pointed to the moose and wapiti trooping down the shallow hills to the watering-places. They moved with a dancing motion, and the multitude of their horns was like a forest walking, a young forest in the spring before the leaves are out and there is a clicking of antlered bough on bough. "They would come in twenty abreast to the licks where we lay in wait for them," said the Tallega. "They were the true trail-makers."
"Then you must have forgotten what I had to do with it," said a voice that seemed to come from high up in the air, so that they all looked up suddenly and would have been frightened at the huge bulk, if the voice coming from it in a squeaky whisper had not made it seem ridiculous. It was the Mastodon, who had strolled in from the pre-historic room, though it was a wonder to the children how so large a beast could move so silently.
"Hey," said a Lenni-Lenape, who had sat comfortably smoking all this time, "I've heard of you--there was an old Telling of my father's--though I hardly think I believed it. What are you doing here?"
"I've a perfect right to come," said the Mastodon, shuffling embarrassedly from foot to foot. "I was the first of my kind to have a man belonging to me, and it was I that showed him the trail to the sea."
"Oh, please, would you tell us about it?" said Dorcas.
The Mastodon rocked to and fro on his huge feet, embarrassedly.
"If--if it would please the company--"
Everybody looked at the Buffalo Chief, for, after all, it was he who began the party. The old bull pawed dust and blew steam from his nostrils, which was a perfectly safe thing to do in case the story didn't turn out to his liking.
"Tell, tell," he agreed, in a voice like a man shouting down twenty rain barrels at once.
And looking about slyly with his little twinkling eyes at the attentive circle, the Mastodon began.

III
HOW THE MASTODON HAPPENED FIRST TO BELONG TO A MAN, AS TOLD BY ARRUMPA
"In my time, everything, even the shape of the land was different. From Two Rivers it was all marsh, marsh and swamp with squidgy islands, with swamp and marsh again till you came to hills and hard land, beyond which was the sea. Nothing grew then but cane and coarse grass, and the water rotting the land until there was no knowing where it was safe treading from year to year. Not that it mattered to my people. We kept to the hills where there was plenty of good browse, and left the swamp to the Grass-Eaters--bunt-headed, woolly-haired eaters of grass!"
Up came Arrumpa's trunk to trumpet his contempt, and out from the hillslope like a picture on a screen stretched for a moment the flat reed-bed of Two Rivers, with great herds of silly, elephant-looking creatures feeding there, with huge incurving trunks and backs that sloped absurdly from a high fore-hump. They rootled in the tall grass or shouldered in long, snaky lines through the canes, their trunks waggling.
"Mammoths they were called," said Arrumpa, "and they hid in the swamp because their tusks curved in and they were afraid of Saber-Tooth, the Tiger. There were a great many of them, though not so many as our people, and also there was Man. It was the year my tusks began to grow that I first saw him. We were coming up from the river to the bedding-ground and there was a thin rim of the moon like a tusk over the hill's shoulder. I remember the damp smell of the earth and the good smell of the browse after the sun goes down, and between them a thin blue mist curling with a stinging smell that made prickles come along the back of my neck.
"'What is that?' I said, for I walked yet with my mother.
"'It is the smell which Man makes so that other people may know where he is and keep away from him,' she said, for my mother had never been friends with Man and she did not know any better.
"Then we came up over the ridge and saw them, about a score, naked and dancing on the