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YOUNG-MAN-WHO-NEVER-TURNS-BACK: A TELLING OF THE TALLEGEWI, BY ONE OF THEM

It could only have been for a few moments at the end of Moke-icha’s story, before the cliff picture split like a thin film before the dancing circles of the watchmen’s lanterns, and curled into the shadows between the cases. A thousand echoes broke out in the empty halls and muffled the voices as the rings of light withdrew down the long gallery in glimmering reflections. When they passed to the floor below a very remarkable change had come over the landscape.

The Buffalo Chief and Moke-icha had disappeared. A little way ahead the trail plunged down the leafy tunnel of an ancient wood, along which the children saw the great elk trotting leisurely with his cows behind him, flattening his antlers over his back out of the way of the low-branching maples. The switching of the brush against the elk’s dun sides startled the little black bear, who was still riffling his bee tree. The children watched him rise inquiringly to his haunches before he scrambled down the trail out of sight.

“Lots of those fellows about in my day,” said the Mound-Builder. “We used to go for them in the fall when they grew fat on the dropping nuts and acorns. Elk, too. I remember a ten-pronged buck that I shot one winter on the Elk’s-Eye River…”

“The Muskingum!” exclaimed an Iroquois, who had listened in silence to the puma’s story. “Did you call it that too? Elk’s-Eye! Clear brown and smooth-flowing. That’s the Scioto Trail, isn’t it?” he asked of the Mound-Builder.

“You could call it that. There was a cut-off at Beaver Dam to Flint Ridge and the crossing of the Muskingum, and another that led to the mouth of the Kanawha where it meets the River of White-Flashing.”

“He means the Ohio,” explained the Iroquois to the children. “At flood the whole surface of the river would run to white riffles like the flash of a water-bird’s wings. But the French called it La Belle Riviere. I’m an Onondaga myself,” he added, “and in my time the Five Nations held all the territory, after we had driven out the Talle-gewi, between the Lakes and the O-hey-yo.” He stretched the word out, giving it a little different turn. “Indians’ names talk little,” he laughed, “but they say much.”

“Like the trails,” agreed the Mound-Builder, who was one of the Tallegewi himself, “every word is the expression of a need. We had a trade route over this one for copper which we fetched from the Land of the Sky-Blue Water and exchanged for sea-shells out of the south. At the mouth of the Scioto it connected with the Kaskaskia Trace to the Missi-Sippu, where we went once a year to shoot buffaloes on the plains.”

“When the Five Nations possessed the country, the buffaloes came to us,” said the Onondaga.

“Then the Long Knives came on the sea in the East and there was neither buffaloes nor Mengwe,” answered the Mound-Builder, who did not like these interruptions. He went on describing the Kaskaskia Trail. “It led along the highlands around the upper waters of the Miami and the drowned lands of the Wabash. It was a wonderful trip in the month of the Moon Halting, when there was a sound of dropping nuts and the woods were all one red and yellow rain. But in summer…I should know,” said the Mound-Builder; “I carried a pipe as far as Little Miami once…”

He broke off as though the recollection was not altogether a happy one and began to walk away from the wood, along the trail, which broadened quickly to a graded way, and led up the slope of a high green mound.

The children followed him without a word. They understood that they had come to the place in the Story of the Trails, which is known in the schoolbooks as “History.” From the top of the mound they could see strange shapes of earthworks stretching between them and the shore of Erie. Lakeward the sand and the standing grass was the pale color of the moon that floated above it in the midday sky. Between them the blue of the lake melted into the blue horizon; the turf over the mounds was thick and wilted.