The Trail Book Page 2

  II

  WHAT THE BUFFALO CHIEF TOLD

  "_Wake! Wake!_" said the Bull Buffalo, with a roll to it, as though theword had been shouted in a deep voice down an empty barrel. He shook thedust out of his mane and stamped his fore-foot to set the herd inmotion. There were thousands of them feeding as far as the eye couldreach, across the prairie, yearlings and cows with their calves of thatseason, and here and there a bull, tossing his heavy head and sending uplight puffs of dust under the pawings of his hoof as he took up theleader's signal.

  "Wake! Wa--ake!"

  It rolled along the ground like thunder. At the sound the herds gatheredthemselves from the prairie, they turned back from the licks, they roseup _plop_ from the wallows, trotting singly in the trails that rayed outto every part of the pastures and led up toward the high ridges.

  "Wa-ak--" began the old bull; then he stopped short, threw up his head,sniffing the wind, and ended with a sharp snort which changed the wordsto "_What? What?_"

  "What's this," said the Bull Buffalo, "Pale Faces?"

  "They are very young," said the young cow, the one with the _going_look. She had just been taken into the herd that season and had theplace of the favorite next to the leader.

  "If you please, sir," said Oliver, "we only wished to know where thetrail went."

  "Why," said the Buffalo Chief, surprised, "to the Buffalo roads, ofcourse. We must be changing pasture." As he pawed contempt upon theshort, dry grass, the rattlesnake, that had been sunning himself at thefoot of the hummock, slid away under the bleached buffalo skull, and thesmall, furry things dived everywhere into their burrows.

  "That is the way always," said the young cow, "when the Buffalo Peoplebegin their travels. Not even a wolf will stay in the midst of theherds; there would be nothing left of him by the time the hooves hadpassed over."

  The children could see how that might be, for as the thin lines began toconverge toward the high places, it was as if the whole prairie hadturned black and moving. Where the trails drew out of the flat lands tothe watersheds, they were wide enough for eight or ten to walk abreast,trodden hard and white as country roads. There was a deep, continuousmurmur from the cows like the voice of the earth talking to itselfat twilight.

  "Come," said the old bull, "we must be moving."

  "But what is that?" said Dorcas Jane, as a new sound came from thedirection of the river, a long chant stretching itself like a snakeacross the prairie, and as they listened there were words that liftedand fell with an odd little pony joggle.

  "That is the Pawnees, singing their travel song," said the BuffaloChief.

  And as he spoke they could see the eagle bonnets of the tribesmen comingup the hollow, every man mounted, with his round shield and the point ofhis lance tilted forward. After them came the women on the pack-ponieswith the goods, and the children stowed on the travoises of lodge-polesthat trailed from the ponies' withers.

  "Ha-ah," said the old bull. "One has laid his ear to the ground in theirlodges and has heard the earth tremble with the passing of theBuffalo People."

  "But where do they go?" said Dorcas.

  "They follow the herds," said the old bull, "for the herds are theirfood and their clothes and their housing. It is the Way Things Are thatthe Buffalo People should make the trails and men should ride in them.They go up along the watersheds where the floods cannot mire, where thesnow is lightest, and there are the best lookouts."

  "And, also, there is the easiest going," said a new voice with a snarlyrunning whine in it. It came from a small gray beast with pointed earsand a bushy tail, and the smut-tipped nose that all coyotes have hadsince their very first father blacked himself bringing fire to Man fromthe Burning Mountain. He had come up very softly at the heels of theBuffalo Chief, who wheeled suddenly and blew steam from his nostrils.

  "That," he said, "is because of the calves. It is not because a buffalocannot go anywhere it pleases him; down ravines where a horse wouldstumble and up cliffs where even you, O Smut Nose, cannot follow."

  "True, Great Chief," said the Coyote, "but I seem to remember trailsthat led through the snow to very desirable places."

  This was not altogether kind, for it is well known that it is only whensnow has lain long enough on the ground to pack and have a hard coatingof ice, that the buffaloes dare trust themselves upon it. When it isnew-fallen and soft they flounder about helplessly until they die ofstarvation, and the wolves pull them down, or the Indians come and killthem. But the old bull had the privilege which belongs to greatness, ofnot being obliged to answer impertinent things that were said to him. Hewent on just as if nothing had interrupted, telling how the buffalotrails had found the mountain passes and how they were rutted deep intothe earth by the migrating herds.

  "I have heard," he said, "that when the Pale Faces came into the countrythey found no better roads anywhere than the buffalo traces--"

  "Also," purred Moke-icha, "I have heard that they found trails throughlands where no buffalo had been before them." Moke-icha, the Puma, layon a brown boulder that matched so perfectly with her watered coat thatif it had not been for the ruffling of the wind on her short fur and thetwitchings of her tail, the children might not have discovered her."Look," she said, stretching out one of her great pads toward the south,where the trail ran thin and white across a puma-colored land, streakedwith black lava and purple shadow. Far at the other end it lifted inred, wall-sided buttes where the homes of the Cliff People stuck likehoneycombs in the wind-scoured hollows.

  "Now I recall a trail in that country," said Moke-icha, "that was olderthan the oldest father's father of them could remember. Four times ayear the People of the Cliffs went down on it to the Sacred Water, andcame back with bags of salt on their shoulders."

  Even as she spoke they could see the people coming out of the Cliffdwellings and the priests going into the kivas preparing forthe journey.

  That was how it was; when any animal spoke of the country he knew best,that was what the children saw. And yet all the time there was thebeginning of the buffalo trail in front of them, and around them, drawnthere by that something of himself which every man puts into the work ofhis hands, the listening tribesmen. One of these spoke now in answer toMoke-icha.

  "Also in my part of the country," he said, "long before there were PaleFaces, there were trade trails and graded ways, and walled ways betweenvillage and village. We traded for cherts as far south as Little Riverin the Tenasas Mountains, and north to the Sky-Blue Water for copperwhich was melted out of rocks, and there were workings at Flint Ridgethat were older than the great mound at Cahokia."

  "Oh," cried both the children at once, "Mound-Builders!"--and theystared at him with interest.

  He was probably not any taller than the other Indians, but seemed so onaccount of his feather headdress which was built up in front with acurious cut-out copper ornament. They thought they recognized the broadbanner stone of greenish slate which he carried, the handle of which wastasseled with turkey beards and tiny tails of ermine. He returned thechildren's stare in the friendliest possible fashion, twirling hisbanner stone as a policeman does his night stick.

  "Were you? Mound-Builders, you know?" questioned Oliver.

  "You could call us that. We called ourselves Tallegewi, and our trailswere old before the buffalo had crossed east of the Missi-Sippu, theFather of all Rivers. Then the country was full of the horned people,thick as flies in the Moon of Stopped Waters." As he spoke, he pointedto the moose and wapiti trooping down the shallow hills to thewatering-places. They moved with a dancing motion, and the multitude oftheir horns was like a forest walking, a young forest in the springbefore the leaves are out and there is a clicking of antlered bough onbough. "They would come in twenty abreast to the licks where we lay inwait for them," said the Tallega. "They were the true trail-makers."

  "Then you must have forgotten what I had to do with it," said a voicethat seemed to come from high up in the air, so that they all looked upsuddenly and would have been frightened at the
huge bulk, if the voicecoming from it in a squeaky whisper had not made it seem ridiculous. Itwas the Mastodon, who had strolled in from the pre-historic room, thoughit was a wonder to the children how so large a beast could moveso silently.

  "Hey," said a Lenni-Lenape, who had sat comfortably smoking all thistime, "I've heard of you--there was an old Telling of myfather's--though I hardly think I believed it. What are you doing here?"

  "I've a perfect right to come," said the Mastodon, shufflingembarrassedly from foot to foot. "I was the first of my kind to have aman belonging to me, and it was I that showed him the trail to the sea."

  "Oh, please, would you tell us about it?" said Dorcas.

  The Mastodon rocked to and fro on his huge feet, embarrassedly.

  "If--if it would please the company--"

  Everybody looked at the Buffalo Chief, for, after all, it was he whobegan the party. The old bull pawed dust and blew steam from hisnostrils, which was a perfectly safe thing to do in case the storydidn't turn out to his liking.

  "Tell, tell," he agreed, in a voice like a man shouting down twenty rainbarrels at once.

  And looking about slyly with his little twinkling eyes at the attentivecircle, the Mastodon began.