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“Then I lifted up my trunk over him, for my heart swelled against the hunters, and I gave voice as a bull should when he walks by himself.

“‘Arr-rr-ump!’ I said. And the people were all silent with astonishment.

“Finally the man who had first spoken, spoke again, very humbly, ‘Great Chief, give us leave to take away your father.’ So we gave them leave. They took the hurt man–his back was broken–away by the vine ladders, and my young man went and lay face down where his father had lain, and shook with many strange noises while water came out of his eyes. When he sat up at last and saw me blowing dust on the spear-cut in my side to stop the bleeding, he gathered broad leaves, dipped them in pine gum, and laid them on the cut. Then I blew dust on these, and seeing that I was more comfortable, Taku-Wakin–that was what I learned to call him–saluted with both hands to his head, palms outward. ‘Friend,’ he said,–‘for if you are not my friend I think I have not one other in the world,–besides, I am too little to kill you,–I go to bury my father.’

“For three days I bathed my knee in the spring, and saw faces come to peer about the edge of it and heard the beat of the village drums. The third day my young man came, wearing his father’s collar of bear’s teeth, with neither fire-stick nor food nor weapon upon him. “‘Now I am all the man my mother has,’ he said; ‘I must do what is necessary to become a tribesman.’

“I did not know then what he meant, but it seems it was a custom.”

All the Indians in the group that had gathered about the Mastodon, nodded at this.

“It was so in my time,” said the Mound-Builder. “When a youth has come to the age where he is counted a man, he goes apart and neither eats nor drinks until, in the shape of some living thing, the Great Mystery has revealed itself to him.

“It was so he explained it to me,” agreed Arrumpa; “and for three days he ate and drank nothing, but walked by himself talking to his god. Other times he would talk to me, scratching my hurts and taking the ticks out of my ears, until–I do not know what it was, but between me and Taku-Wakin it happened that we understood, each of us, what the other was thinking in his heart as well as if we had words–Is this also a custom?”

A look of intelligence passed between 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.