The Trail Book Part 13

It was the custom in war-times to bring the women and the corn into the walled towns from the open villages. But there had been peace so long in Tallega that our stockade was in great need of rebuilding, and so were the corn bins. Well-Praised was expecting trouble with the Lenni-Lenape, I concluded; but I did not take it very seriously. The Moon of Stopped Waters was still young in the sky, and the fifth day of the Moon Halting seemed very far away to me.

"We were eleven days in all carrying the Pipe to the Miami villages, and though they fed us well at the towns where we stopped, we were as thin as snipe at the end of it. It was our first important running, you see, and we wished to make a record. We followed the main trails which followed the watersheds. Between these, we plunged down close-leaved, sweating tunnels of underbrush, through tormenting clouds of flies. In the bottoms the slither of our moccasins in the black mud would wake clumps of water snakes, big as a man's head, that knotted themselves together in the sun. There is a certain herb which snakes do not love which we rubbed on our ankles, but we could hear them rustle and hiss as we ran, and the hot air was all a-click and a-glitter with insects'

wings; ... also there were trumpet flowers, dusky-throated, that made me think of my girl at Flint Ridge... Then we would come out on long ridges where oak and hickory shouldered one another like the round-backed billows of the lake after the storm. We made our record. And for all that we were not so pressed nor so overcome with the dignity of our errand that we could not spare one afternoon to climb up to the Wabas.h.i.+ki Beacon. It lies on the watershed between the headwaters of the Maumee and the Wabash, a cone-shaped mound and a circling wall within which there was always wood piled for the beacon light, the Great Gleam, the Wabas.h.i.+ki, which could be seen the country round for a two days'

journey. The Light-Keeper was very pleased with our company and told us old tales half the night long, about how the Beacon had been built and how it was taken by turns by the Round Heads and the Painted Turtles. He asked us also if we had seen anything of a party of Lenni-Lenape which he had noted the day before, crossing the bottoms about an hour after he had sighted us. He thought they must have gone around by Crow Creek, avoiding the village, and that we should probably come up with them the next morning, which proved to be the case.

"They rose upon us suddenly as we dropped down to the east fork of the Maumee, and asked us rudely where we were going. They had no right, of course, but they were our elders, to whom it is necessary to be respectful, and they were rather terrifying, with their great bows, tall as they were, stark naked except for a strip of deerskin, and their feathers on end like the quills of an angry porcupine. We had no weapons ourselves, except short hunting-bows,--one does not travel with peace on his mouth and a war weapon at his back,--so we answered truly, and Ongyata.s.se read the scroll to them, which I thought unnecessary.

"'Now, I think,' said my friend, when the Lenape had left us with some question about a hunting-party, which they had evidently invented to excuse their rudeness, 'that it was for such as these that the scroll was written.' But we could not understand why Well-Praised should have gone to all that trouble to let the Lenni-Lenape know that he had called a Council.

"When we had smoked our last pipe, we were still two or three days from Three Towns, and we decided to try for a cut-off by a hunting-trail which Ongyata.s.se had been over once, years ago, with his father. These hunting-traces go everywhere through the Tallegewi Country. You can tell them by the way they fork from the main trails and, after a day or two, thin into nothing. We traveled well into the night from the place that Ongyata.s.se remembered, so as to steer by the stars, and awoke to the pleasant p.r.i.c.king of adventure. But we had gone half the morning before we began to be sure that we were followed.

"Jays that squawked and fell silent as we pa.s.sed, called the alarm again a few minutes later. A porcupine which we saw, asleep upon a log, woke up and came running from behind us. We thought of the Lenni-Lenape.

Where a bare surface of rock across our path made it possible to turn out without leaving a track, we stole back a few paces and waited.

Presently we made out, through the thick leaves, a youth, about our age we supposed, for his head was not cropped and he was about the height of Ongyata.s.se. When we had satisfied ourselves that he was alone, we took pleasure in puzzling him. As soon as he missed our tracks in the trail, he knew that he was discovered and played quarry to our fox very craftily. For an hour or two we stalked one another between the buckeye boles, and then I stepped on a rotten log which crumbled and threw me noisily. The Lenape let fly an arrow in our direction. We were nearing a crest of a ridge where the underbrush thinned out, and as soon as we had a glimpse of his naked legs slipping from tree to tree, Ongyata.s.se made a dash for him. We raced like deer through the still woods, Ongyata.s.se gaining on the flying figure, and I about four laps behind him. A low branch swished blindingly across my eyes for a moment, and when I could look again, the woods were suddenly still and empty.

"I dropped instantly, for I did not know what this might mean, and creeping cautiously to the spot where I had last seen them, I saw the earth opening in a sharp, deep ravine, at the bottom of which lay Ongyata.s.se with one leg crumpled under him. I guessed that the Lenape must have led him to the edge and then slipped aside just in time to let the force of Ongyata.s.se's running carry him over. Without waiting to plan, I began to climb down the steep side of the ravine. About halfway down I was startled by a rustling below, and, creeping along the bottom of the bluff, I saw the Lenni-Lenape with his knife between his teeth, within an arm's length of my friend. I cried out, and in a foolish effort to save him, I must have let go of the ledge to which I clung.

The next thing I knew I was lying half-stunned, with a great many pains in different parts of me, at the bottom of the ravine, almost within touch of Ongyata.s.se and a young Lenape with an amulet of white deer's horn about his neck and, across his back, what had once been a white quiver. He was pouring water from a birch-bark cup upon my friend, and as soon as he saw that my eyes were opened he came and offered me a drink. There did not seem to be anything to say, so we said nothing, but presently, when I could sit up, he washed the cut on the back of my head, and then he showed me that Ongyata.s.se's knee was out of place, and said that we ought to pull it back before he came to himself.

"I crawled over--I had saved myself by falling squarely on top of White Quiver so that nothing worse happened to me than sore ribs and a finger broken--and took my friend around the body while our enemy pulled the knee, and Ongyata.s.se groaned aloud and came back. Then White Quiver tied up my finger in a splint of bark, and we endured our pains and said nothing.

"We were both prisoners of the Lenape. So we considered ourselves; we waited to see what he would do about it. Toward evening he went off for an hour and returned with a deer which he dressed very skillfully and gave us to eat. Then, of the wet hide, he made a bandage for Ongyata.s.se's knee, which shrunk as it dried and kept down the swelling.

"'Now I shall owe you my name as well as my life,' said Ongyata.s.se, for if his knee had not been properly attended, that would have been the end of his running.

"'Then your new name would be Well-Friended,' said the Lenape, and he made a very good story of how I had come tumbling down on both of them.

We laughed, but Ongyata.s.se had another question.

"'There was peace on my mouth and peace between Lenni-Lenape and Tallegewi. Why should you chase us?'

"'The Tallegewi send a Pipe to the Three Clans. Will you swear that the message that went with it had nothing to do with the Lenni-Lenape?'

"'What should two boys know of a call to Council?' said Ongyata.s.se, and showed him the birch-bark scroll, to which White Quiver paid no attention.

"'There is peace between us, and a treaty, the terms of which were made by the Tallegewi, all of which we have kept. We have entered no town without invitation. When one of our young men stole a maiden of yours we returned her to her village.' He went on telling many things, new to us, of the highness of the Lenni-Lenape. 'All this was agreed at the Three Towns by Cool Waters,' said he. 'Now comes a new order. We may not enter the towns at all. The treaty was for camping privileges in any one place for the s.p.a.ce of one moon. Now, if we are three days in one place, we are told that we must move on. The Lenni-Lenape are not Two-Talkers. If we wear peace on our mouths we wear it in our hearts also.'

"'There is peace between your people and mine, and among the Tallegewi, peace.'

"'So,' said White Quiver. 'Then why do they rebuild their stockades and fetch arrow-stone from far quarries? And why do they call a Council in the Moon of the Harvest?'

"I remembered the good trade my uncle, the arrow-maker, had had that summer, and was amazed at his knowledge of it, so I answered as I had been taught. 'If I were a Lenape,' said I, 'and thought that the Councils of the Tallegewi threatened my people, I would know what those Councils were if I made myself a worm in the roof-tree to overhear it.'

"'Aye,' he said, 'but you are only a Tallega.'

"He was like that with us, proud and humble by turns. Though he was a naked savage, traveling through our land on sufferance, he could make us crawl in our hearts for the Tallegewi. He suspected us of much evil, most of which was true as it turned out; yet all the time we lay at the bottom of the ravine, for the most part helpless, he killed every day for us, and gathered dry gra.s.s to make a bed for Ongyata.s.se.

"We talked no more of the Council or of our errand, but as youths will, we talked of highness, and of big game in s.h.i.+naki, and of the ways of the Tallegewi, of which for the most part he was scornful.

"Corn he allowed us as a great advantage, but of our towns he doubted whether they did not make us fat and Two-Talkers.

"'Town is a trade-maker,' he said; 'men who trade much for things, will also trade for honor.'

"'The Lenni-Lenape carry their honor in their hands,' said Ongyata.s.se, 'but the Tallegewi carry theirs in their forehead.'

"He meant," said the Mound-Builder, turning to the children, "that the Lenni-Lenape fought for what they held most dear, and the Tallegewi schemed and plotted for it. That was as we were taught. With us, the hand is not lifted until the head has spoken. But as it turned out, between Tallegewi and Lenape, the fighters had the best of it."

He sighed, making the salutation to the dead as he looked off, across the burial-grounds, to the crumbling heap of the G.o.d-house.

"But I don't understand," said Dorcas; "were Ongyata.s.se and White Quiver friends or enemies?"

"They were two foes who loved one another, and though their tribes fell into long and b.l.o.o.d.y war, between these two there was highness and, at the end, most wonderful kindness. The first time that we got Ongyata.s.se to his feet and he found that his knee, though feeble, was as good as ever, he said to White Quiver, leaning on his shoulder,--

"'Concerning the call to Council, there was more to it than was written on the scroll, the meaning of which was hidden from me who carried it.'

"'Which is no news to me,' said the Lenni-Lenape; 'also,' he said, 'the message was arranged beforehand, for it required no answer.'

"I asked him how he knew that, and he mocked at me.

"'Any time these five days you could have gone forward with the answer had it been important for you to get back to Cool Waters!'

"That was true. I could have left Ongyata.s.se and gone on alone, but nothing that had happened so far had made us think that we must get back quickly. White Quiver asked us one day what reason Well-Praised had given for requiring that the Lenni-Lenape should pa.s.s through the country with not more than twenty fighting men in the party. To save the game, we told him, which seemed to us reasonable; though I think from that hour we began to feel that the Tallegewi, with all their walled towns and monuments, had been put somehow in the wrong by the wild tribes of s.h.i.+naki.

"We stayed on in the ravine, waiting on Ongyata.s.se's knee, until we saw the new rim of the Halting Moon curled up like a feather. The leaves of the buckeye turned clear yellow and the first flock of wild geese went over. We waited one more day for White Quiver to show us a short cut to the Maumee Trail, and just when we had given him up, we were aware of a strange Lenape in warpaint moving among the shadows. He stood off from us with his arms folded and his face was as bleak as a winter-bitten wood.

"'Wash the lie from your mouth,' he said, 'and follow.'

"Without a word he turned and began to move from us through the smoky light with which the wood was filling. His head was cropped for war--that was why we did not know him--and along the shoulder he turned toward us was the long sc.r.a.pe of a spear-point. That was why we followed, saying nothing. Toward daylight the lame knee began to give trouble. White Quiver came back and put his shoulder under Ongyata.s.se's, so we moved forward, wordlessly. Birds awoke in the woods, and h.o.a.rfrost lay white on the crisped gra.s.ses.

"On a headland from which the lake glinted white as a blade of flint on the horizon, we waited the sunrise. Smoke arose, from Wabas.h.i.+ki, from the direction of the Maumee settlements, from the lake sh.o.r.e towns; tall plumes of smoke shook and threatened. Curtly, while we ate, White Quiver told us what had happened; how the Tallegewi, in violation of the treaty, had fallen suddenly on scattered bands of the Lenni-Lenape and all but exterminated them. The Tallegewi said that it was because they had discovered that the Lenni-Lenape had plotted to fall upon our towns, as soon as the corn was harvested, and take them. But White Quiver thought that the whole thing was a plan of Well-Praised from the beginning. He had been afraid to refuse pa.s.sage to the Lenape, on account of their great numbers, and had arranged to have them broken up in small parties so that they could be dealt with separately."

"And which was it?" Oliver wished to know.

"It was a thousand years ago," said the Mound-Builder. "Who remembers?

But we were ashamed, my friend and I, for we understood now that the secret meaning of our message about the Horned Heads had been that the Tallegewi should fall upon the Lenape wherever they found them. You remember that it was part of the question and answer that they 'came into the fields and ate up the harvest.'

"There might have been a plot, but, on the other hand, we knew that the painted scroll had been a blind to make the Lenni-Lenape think that the Tallegewi would do nothing until they had taken counsel. But we had carried a war message with peace upon our mouths and we were ashamed before White Quiver. We had talked much highness with him, and besides, we loved him. As it turned out we were not wrong in thinking he loved us. As we stood making out the points of direction for the trail, Ongyata.s.se's knee gave under him, and as White Quiver put out his arm without thinking, a tremor pa.s.sed over them. They stood so leaning each on each for a moment. 'Your trail lies thus ... and thus ...' said the Lenape, 'but I do not know what you will find at the end of it.' Then he loosed his arm from my friend's shoulder, took a step back, and the forest closed about him.

"We were two days more on the trail, though we did not go directly to Cool Waters. Some men of the Painted Turtles that we met, told us the fight had pa.s.sed from the neighborhood of the towns and gathered at Bent Bar Crossing. Our fathers were both there, which we made an excuse for joining them. At several places we saw evidences of fighting. All the bands of Lenni-Lenape that were not too far in our territory had come hurrying back toward Fish River, and other bands, as the rumor of fighting spread, came down out of s.h.i.+naki like buzzards to a carca.s.s.

From Cool Waters to Namae-sippu, the Dark Wood was full of war-cries and groaning. At Fish River the Tallegewi fell in hundreds ... there is a mound there ... at Bent Bar the Lenni-Lenape held the ford, keeping a pa.s.sage open for flying bands that were pressed up from the south by the Painted Turtles. Ongyata.s.se went about getting together his old band from the Three Towns, fretting because we were not allowed to take the front of the battle.

"Three days the fight raged about the crossing. The Lenni-Lenape were the better bowmen; their long arrows carried heavier points. Some that I found in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of my friends, I had made, and it made my own heart hot within me. The third day, men from the farther lake towns came up the river in their canoes, and the Lenape, afraid of being cut off from their friends in the Dark Wood, broke across the river. As soon as they began to go, our young men, who feared the fight would be over without them, could not be held back. Ongyata.s.se at our head, we plunged into the river after them.

"Even in flight the Lenni-Lenape were most glorious fighters. They dived among the canoes to hack holes in the bottoms, and rising from under the sides they pulled the paddlers bodily into the river. We were mad with our first fight, we youngsters, for we let them lead us up over the bank and straight into ambush. We were the Young-Men-Who-Never-Turned-Back.

"That was a true name for many of us," said the Mound-Builder. "I remember Ongyata.s.se's shrill eagle cry above the '_G'we! G'we_!' of the Lenni-Lenape, and the next thing I knew I was struggling in the river, bleeding freely from a knife wound, and somebody was pulling me into a canoe and safety."

"And Ongyata.s.se--?" The children looked at the low mound between the Council Place and the G.o.d-House.

The Mound-Builder nodded.