The Trail Book | Page 8

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 cliff, and every man going out to the hunt threw a dart at it, as an omen. If it stuck, the omen was good, but if the point of the dart broke against the face of the cliff and fell back, the hunter returned to his hut, and if he hunted at all that day, he went out in another direction. We could see the shafts of the darts fast in the cleft, bristling in the moonlight.
"'Wait here, under the Arch,' said Taku-Wakin, 'till I see if the arrow of my thought finds a cleft to stick into.'
"So we waited, watching the white, webby moons of the spiders, wet in the grass, and the man huts sleeping on the hill, and felt the Dawn's breath pricking the skin of our shoulders. The huts were mere heaps of brush like rats' nests.
"'Shall I walk on the huts for a sign, Little Chief?' said I.
"'Not that, Old Hilltop,' he laughed; 'there are people under the huts, and what good is a Sign without