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, […]

TOLD BY THE COYOTE “Concerning that Talking Stick of Taku-Wa-kin’s,”–said the Coyote, as the company settled back after Arrumpa’s story,–“there is a Telling of my people … not of a Rod, but a Skin, a hide of thy people, Great Chief,”–he bowed to the Bull Buffalo,–“that talked of Tamal-Pyweack and a Dead Man’s Journey–” The […]

TOLD BY THE CORN WOMAN It was one of those holidays, when there isn’t any school and the Museum is only opened for a few hours in the afternoon, that Dorcas Jane had come into the north gallery of the Indian room where her father was at work mending the radiators. This was about a […]

TOLD BY MOKE-ICHA Oliver was so interested in his sister’s account of how the corn came into the country, that that very evening he dragged out a tattered old atlas which he had rescued from the Museum waste, and began to look for the places named by the Corn Woman. They found the old Chihuahua […]

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 […]

BY THE ONONDAGA Down the Mound-Builder’s graded way the children ran looking for the Onondaga. Like all the trail in the Museum Country it covered a vast tract of country in a very little while, so that it was no time at all before they came out among high, pine-covered swells, that broke along the […]

From the time that he had first found, himself alone with them, Oliver had felt sure that the animals could come alive again if they wished. That was one blowy afternoon about a week after his father had been made night engineer and nobody had come into the Museum for several hours. Oliver had been […]

Oh, the Shepherds in Judea, They are pacing to and fro, For the air grows chill at twilight And the weanling lambs are slow! Leave, O lambs, the dripping sedges, quit the bramble and the brier, Leave the fields of barley stubble, for we light the watching fire; Twinkling fires across the twilight, and a […]