The Trail Book Read online

  IX

  HOW THE LENNI-LENAPE CAME FROM SHINAKI AND THE TALLEGEWI FOUGHT THEM:THE SECOND PART OF THE MOUND-BUILDER'S STORY

  "Two things I thought as I looked at Never-Turns-Back, black against thesun. First, that it could be no very great errand that he ran upon, orthey would never have trusted it to a youth without honors; and next,that affairs at Three Towns must be serious, indeed, if they could spareno older man for pipe-carrying. A third came to me in the night as Iconsidered how little agreement there was between these two, which wasthat there must be more behind this sending than a plain callto Council.

  "Ongyatasse told me all he knew as we lay up the next night at PigeonRoost. There had not been time earlier, for he had hurried off to carryhis pipe to the village of Flint Ridge as soon as he had called me, andwe had padded out on the Scioto Cut-off at daybreak.

  "What he said went back to the conditions that were made by Well-Praisedfor the passing of the Lenni-Lenape through our territory. They were togo in small parties, not more than twenty fighting men to any one ofthem. They were to change none of our landmarks, enter none of our townswithout permission from the Town Council, and to keep between the lakeand the great bend of the river, which the Lenni-Lenape calledAllegheny, but was known to us as the River of the Tallegewi.

  "Thus they had begun to come, few at first, like the trickle of meltingice in the moon of the Sun Returning, and at the last, like grasshoppersin the standing corn. They fished out our rivers and swept up the gamelike fire in the forest. Three Towns sent scouts toward Fish River whoreported that the Lenape swarmed in the Dark Wood, that they came onfrom Shinaki thick as their own firs. Then the Three Towns took counciland sent a pipe to the Eagle villages, to the Wolverines and the PaintedTurtles. These three kept the country of the Tallegewi on the north fromMaumee to the headwaters of the Allegheny, and Well-Praised was theirwar leader.

  "Still," said the Mound-Builder, "except that he was the swiftestrunner, I couldn't understand why they had chosen an untried youth forpipe-carrying."

  He felt in a pouch of kit fox with the tail attached, which hung fromthe front of his girdle like the sporran of a Scotch Highlander. Out ofit he drew a roll of birch bark painted with juice of poke-berries. TheTallega spread it on the grass, weighting one end with the turtle-back,as he read, with the children looking over his shoulder.

  Well-Praised, war-chief of the Eagle Clan to the PaintedTurtles;--Greeting.]

  Come to the Council House at Three Towns.]

  On the fifth day of the Moon Halting.]

  We meet as Brothers.]

  "An easy scroll to read," said the Tallega, as the released edges of thebirch-bark roll clipped together. "But there was more to it than that.There was an arrow play; also a question that had to be answered in acertain way. Ongyatasse did not tell me what they were, but I learned atthe first village where we stopped.

  "This is the custom of pipe-carrying. When we approached a settlement wewould show ourselves to the women working in the fields or to childrenplaying, anybody who would go and carry word to the Head Man that thePipe was coming. It was in order to be easily recognized that Ongyatassewore the Peace Mark."

  The Mound-Builder felt in his pouch for a lump of chalky white clay withwhich he drew a wide mark around his mouth, and two cheek-marks like aparenthesis. It would have been plain as far as one could see him.

  "That was so the villages would know that one came with Peace words inhis mouth, and make up their minds quickly whether they wanted to speakwith him. Sometimes when there was quarreling between the clans theywould not receive a messenger. But even in war-times a man's life wassafe as long as he wore the White Mark."

  "Ours is a white flag," said Oliver.

  The Mound-Builder nodded.

  "All civilized peoples have much the same customs," he agreed, "but theLenni-Lenape were savages.

  "We lay that night at Pigeon Roost in the Scioto Bottoms with wildpigeons above us thick as blackberries on the vines. They woke us goingout at dawn like thunder, and at mid-morning they still darkened thesun. We cut into the Kaskaskia Trail by a hunting-trace my uncle hadtold us of, and by the middle of the second day we had made the firstEagle village. When we were sure we had been seen, we sat down andwaited until the women came bringing food. Then the Head Man came infull dress and smoked with us."

  Out of his pouch the Tallega drew the eagle-shaped ceremonial pipe ofred pipestone, and when he had fitted it to the feathered stem, blew asalutatory whiff of smoke to the Great Spirit.

  "Thus we did, and later in the Council House there were ceremonies andexchange of messages. It was there, when all seemed finished, that I sawthe arrow play and heard the question.

  "Ongyatasse drew an arrow from his quiver and scraped it. There wasdried blood on the point, which makes an arrow untrue to its aim, but itwas no business for a youth to be cleaning his arrows before the eldersof the Town House; therefore, I took notice that this was the meat ofhis message. Ongyatasse scraped and the Head Man watched him.

  "'There are many horned heads in the forest this season,' he said atlast.

  "'Very many,' said Ongyatasse; 'they come into the fields and eat up theharvest.'

  "'In that case,' said the Head Man, 'what should a man do?'

  "'What can he do but let fly at them with a broad arrow?' saidOngyatasse, putting up his own arrow, as a man puts up his work when itis finished.

  "But as the arrow was not clean, and as the Lenni-Lenape had shot allthe deer, if I had not known that Well-Praised had devised both questionand answer, it would have seemed all foolishness. There had been noGeneral Council since the one at which the treaty of passage was madewith the Lenni-Lenape; therefore I knew that the War-Chief had plannedthis sending of dark messages in advance, messages which noYoung-Man-Who-Never-Turns-Back had any right to understand.

  "'But why the Painted Scroll?' I said to Ongyatasse; for if, as Isupposed, the real message was in the question and answer, I could notsee why there should still be a Council called.

  "'The scroll,' said my friend, 'is for those who are meant to be fooledby it.'

  "'But who should be fooled?'

  "'Whoever should stop us on the trail.'

  "'My thoughts do not move so fast as my feet, O my friend,' said I. 'Whowould stop a pipe-carrier of the Tallegewi?" "'What if it should be theHorned Heads?' said Ongyatasse.

  "That was a name we had given the Lenni-Lenape on account of thefeathers they tied to the top of their hair, straight up like hornssprouting. Of course, they could have had no possible excuse forstopping us, being at peace, but I began to put this together withthings Ongyatasse had told me, particularly the reason why no older manthan he could be spared from Three Towns. He said the men wererebuilding the stockade and getting in the harvest.

  "The middle one of Three Towns was walled, a circling wall of earth halfman high, and on top of that, a stockade of planted posts and wattles.It was the custom in war-times to bring the women and the corn into thewalled towns from the open villages. But there had been peace so long inTallega that our stockade was in great need of rebuilding, and so werethe corn bins. Well-Praised was expecting trouble with the Lenni-Lenape,I concluded; but I did not take it very seriously. The Moon of StoppedWaters was still young in the sky, and the fifth day of the Moon Haltingseemed very far away to me.

  "We were eleven days in all carrying the Pipe to the Miami villages, andthough they fed us well at the towns where we stopped, we were as thinas 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 whichfollowed the watersheds. Between these, we plunged down close-leaved,sweating tunnels of underbrush, through tormenting clouds of flies. Inthe bottoms the slither of our moccasins in the black mud would wakeclumps of water snakes, big as a man's head, that knotted themselvestogether in the sun. There is a certain herb which snakes do not lovewhich we rubbed on our ankles, but we could hear them rustle and hiss aswe ran, and the hot air was all a-click a
nd a-glitter with insects'wings; ... also there were trumpet flowers, dusky-throated, that made methink of my girl at Flint Ridge... Then we would come out on long ridgeswhere oak and hickory shouldered one another like the round-backedbillows of the lake after the storm. We made our record. And for allthat we were not so pressed nor so overcome with the dignity of ourerrand that we could not spare one afternoon to climb up to theWabashiki Beacon. It lies on the watershed between the headwaters of theMaumee and the Wabash, a cone-shaped mound and a circling wall withinwhich there was always wood piled for the beacon light, the Great Gleam,the Wabashiki, which could be seen the country round for a two days'journey. The Light-Keeper was very pleased with our company and told usold tales half the night long, about how the Beacon had been built andhow it was taken by turns by the Round Heads and the Painted Turtles. Heasked us also if we had seen anything of a party of Lenni-Lenape whichhe had noted the day before, crossing the bottoms about an hour after hehad sighted us. He thought they must have gone around by Crow Creek,avoiding the village, and that we should probably come up with them thenext morning, which proved to be the case.

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

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

  "When we had smoked our last pipe, we were still two or three days fromThree Towns, and we decided to try for a cut-off by a hunting-trailwhich Ongyatasse had been over once, years ago, with his father. Thesehunting-traces go everywhere through the Tallegewi Country. You can tellthem 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 thatOngyatasse remembered, so as to steer by the stars, and awoke to thepleasant pricking of adventure. But we had gone half the morning beforewe began to be sure that we were followed.

  "Jays that squawked and fell silent as we passed, called the alarm againa few minutes later. A porcupine which we saw, asleep upon a log, wokeup 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 turnout without leaving a track, we stole back a few paces and waited.Presently we made out, through the thick leaves, a youth, about our agewe supposed, for his head was not cropped and he was about the height ofOngyatasse. When we had satisfied ourselves that he was alone, we tookpleasure 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 verycraftily. For an hour or two we stalked one another between the buckeyeboles, and then I stepped on a rotten log which crumbled and threw menoisily. The Lenape let fly an arrow in our direction. We were nearing acrest of a ridge where the underbrush thinned out, and as soon as we hada glimpse of his naked legs slipping from tree to tree, Ongyatasse madea dash for him. We raced like deer through the still woods, Ongyatassegaining on the flying figure, and I about four laps behind him. A lowbranch swished blindingly across my eyes for a moment, and when I couldlook again, the woods were suddenly still and empty.

  "I dropped instantly, for I did not know what this might mean, andcreeping cautiously to the spot where I had last seen them, I saw theearth opening in a sharp, deep ravine, at the bottom of which layOngyatasse with one leg crumpled under him. I guessed that the Lenapemust have led him to the edge and then slipped aside just in time to letthe force of Ongyatasse's running carry him over. Without waiting toplan, I began to climb down the steep side of the ravine. About halfwaydown I was startled by a rustling below, and, creeping along the bottomof 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 foolisheffort 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 painsin different parts of me, at the bottom of the ravine, almost withintouch of Ongyatasse and a young Lenape with an amulet of white deer'shorn about his neck and, across his back, what had once been a whitequiver. He was pouring water from a birch-bark cup upon my friend, andas soon as he saw that my eyes were opened he came and offered me adrink. There did not seem to be anything to say, so we said nothing, butpresently, when I could sit up, he washed the cut on the back of myhead, and then he showed me that Ongyatasse's knee was out of place, andsaid 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 WhiteQuiver so that nothing worse happened to me than sore ribs and a fingerbroken--and took my friend around the body while our enemy pulled theknee, and Ongyatasse groaned aloud and came back. Then White Quiver tiedup my finger in a splint of bark, and we endured our pains andsaid nothing.

  "We were both prisoners of the Lenape. So we considered ourselves; wewaited to see what he would do about it. Toward evening he went off foran hour and returned with a deer which he dressed very skillfully andgave us to eat. Then, of the wet hide, he made a bandage forOngyatasse'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 Ongyatasse, forif his knee had not been properly attended, that would have been the endof his running.

  "'Then your new name would be Well-Friended,' said the Lenape, and hemade a very good story of how I had come tumbling down on both of them.We laughed, but Ongyatasse had another question.

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

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

  "'What should two boys know of a call to Council?' said Ongyatasse, andshowed him the birch-bark scroll, to which White Quiver paid noattention.

  "'There is peace between us, and a treaty, the terms of which were madeby the Tallegewi, all of which we have kept. We have entered no townwithout invitation. When one of our young men stole a maiden of yours wereturned 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 ThreeTowns by Cool Waters,' said he. 'Now comes a new order. We may not enterthe towns at all. The treaty was for camping privileges in any one placefor the space of one moon. Now, if we are three days in one place, weare told that we must move on. The Lenni-Lenape are not Two-Talkers. Ifwe 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 andfetch arrow-stone from far quarries? And why do they call a Council inthe Moon of the Harvest?'

  "I remembered the good trade my uncle, the arrow-maker, had had thatsummer, and was amazed at his knowledge of it, so I answered as I hadbeen taught. 'If I were a Lenape,' said I, 'and thought that theCouncils of the Tallegewi threatened my people, I would know what thoseCouncils 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 anaked savage, traveling through our land on sufferance, he could make uscrawl 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 thebottom of the ravine, for t
he most part helpless, he killed every dayfor us, and gathered dry grass to make a bed for Ongyatasse.

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

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

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

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

  "He meant," said the Mound-Builder, turning to the children, "that theLenni-Lenape fought for what they held most dear, and the Tallegewischemed and plotted for it. That was as we were taught. With us, thehand 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, acrossthe burial-grounds, to the crumbling heap of the god-house.

  "But I don't understand," said Dorcas; "were Ongyatasse and White Quiverfriends or enemies?"

  "They were two foes who loved one another, and though their tribes fellinto long and bloody war, between these two there was highness and, atthe end, most wonderful kindness. The first time that we got Ongyatasseto his feet and he found that his knee, though feeble, was as good asever, he said to White Quiver, leaning on his shoulder,--

  "'Concerning the call to Council, there was more to it than was writtenon 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, 'themessage 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 answerhad it been important for you to get back to Cool Waters!'

  "That was true. I could have left Ongyatasse and gone on alone, butnothing that had happened so far had made us think that we must get backquickly. White Quiver asked us one day what reason Well-Praised hadgiven for requiring that the Lenni-Lenape should pass through thecountry with not more than twenty fighting men in the party. To save thegame, we told him, which seemed to us reasonable; though I think fromthat hour we began to feel that the Tallegewi, with all their walledtowns and monuments, had been put somehow in the wrong by the wildtribes of Shinaki.

  "We stayed on in the ravine, waiting on Ongyatasse's knee, until we sawthe new rim of the Halting Moon curled up like a feather. The leaves ofthe buckeye turned clear yellow and the first flock of wild geese wentover. We waited one more day for White Quiver to show us a short cut tothe Maumee Trail, and just when we had given him up, we were aware of astrange Lenape in warpaint moving among the shadows. He stood off fromus 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 smokylight with which the wood was filling. His head was cropped forwar--that was why we did not know him--and along the shoulder he turnedtoward us was the long scrape of a spear-point. That was why wefollowed, saying nothing. Toward daylight the lame knee began to givetrouble. White Quiver came back and put his shoulder under Ongyatasse's,so we moved forward, wordlessly. Birds awoke in the woods, and hoarfrostlay white on the crisped grasses.

  "On a headland from which the lake glinted white as a blade of flint onthe horizon, we waited the sunrise. Smoke arose, from Wabashiki, fromthe direction of the Maumee settlements, from the lake shore towns; tallplumes of smoke shook and threatened. Curtly, while we ate, White Quivertold us what had happened; how the Tallegewi, in violation of thetreaty, had fallen suddenly on scattered bands of the Lenni-Lenape andall but exterminated them. The Tallegewi said that it was because theyhad discovered that the Lenni-Lenape had plotted to fall upon our towns,as soon as the corn was harvested, and take them. But White Quiverthought that the whole thing was a plan of Well-Praised from thebeginning. He had been afraid to refuse passage to the Lenape, onaccount of their great numbers, and had arranged to have them broken upin 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 thesecret meaning of our message about the Horned Heads had been that theTallegewi should fall upon the Lenape wherever they found them. Youremember that it was part of the question and answer that they 'cameinto the fields and ate up the harvest.'

  "There might have been a plot, but, on the other hand, we knew that thepainted scroll had been a blind to make the Lenni-Lenape think that theTallegewi would do nothing until they had taken counsel. But we hadcarried a war message with peace upon our mouths and we were ashamedbefore 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 lovedus. As we stood making out the points of direction for the trail,Ongyatasse's knee gave under him, and as White Quiver put out his armwithout thinking, a tremor passed over them. They stood so leaning eachon each for a moment. 'Your trail lies thus ... and thus ...' said theLenape, 'but I do not know what you will find at the end of it.' Then heloosed his arm from my friend's shoulder, took a step back, and theforest closed about him.

  "We were two days more on the trail, though we did not go directly toCool Waters. Some men of the Painted Turtles that we met, told us thefight had passed from the neighborhood of the towns and gathered at BentBar Crossing. Our fathers were both there, which we made an excuse forjoining them. At several places we saw evidences of fighting. All thebands of Lenni-Lenape that were not too far in our territory had comehurrying back toward Fish River, and other bands, as the rumor offighting spread, came down out of Shinaki like buzzards to a carcass.From Cool Waters to Namae-sippu, the Dark Wood was full of war-cries andgroaning. At Fish River the Tallegewi fell in hundreds ... there is amound there ... at Bent Bar the Lenni-Lenape held the ford, keeping apassage open for flying bands that were pressed up from the south by thePainted Turtles. Ongyatasse went about getting together his old bandfrom the Three Towns, fretting because we were not allowed to take thefront of the battle.

  "Three days the fight raged about the crossing. The Lenni-Lenape werethe better bowmen; their long arrows carried heavier points. Some that Ifound in the breasts of my friends, I had made, and it made my own hearthot within me. The third day, men from the farther lake towns came upthe river in their canoes, and the Lenape, afraid of being cut off fromtheir friends in the Dark Wood, broke across the river. As soon as theybegan to go, our young men, who feared the fight would be over withoutthem, could not be held back. Ongyatasse at our head, we plunged intothe river after them.

  "Even in flight the Lenni-Lenape were most glorious fighters. They divedamong the canoes to hack holes in the bottoms, and rising from under thesides they pulled the paddlers bodily into the river. We were mad withour first fight, we youngsters, for we let them lead us up over the bankand 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. "Iremember Ongyatasse's shrill eagle cry above the '_G'we! G'we_!' of theLenni-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 acanoe and safety."

  "And Ongyatasse--?" The children looked at the low mound between theCouncil Place and the God-House.

  The Mound-Builder nodded.

  "We put our spears together to make a tent over him before the earth waspiled," he said, "and it was good to be able to do even so much as thatfor him. For we thought at first we should never find him. He was not onthe river, nor in our side of the Dark Wood, and the elders would notpermit us to go across in search of him. But at da
ylight the gatherersof the dead saw something moving from under the mist that hid theopposite bank of the river. We waited, arrow on bowstring, not knowingif it were one of our own coming back to us or a Lenape asking forparley. But as it drew near we saw it was a cropped head, and he towed adead Tallega by the hair. Ripples that spread out from his quiet waketook the sun, and the measured dip of the swimmer's arm was no louderthan the whig of the cooter that paddled in the shallows.

  "It had been a true word that Ongyatasse had given his life and his luckto White Quiver; the Lenape had done his best to give them back again.As he came ashore with the stiffened form, we saw him take the whitedeer amulet from his own neck and fasten it around the neck ofOngyatasse. Then, disdaining even to make the Peace sign for his ownsafe returning, he plunged into the river again, swimming steadilywithout haste until the fog hid him."

  The Mound-Builder stood up, wrapping his feather mantle about him andbegan to move down the slope of the Town Mound, the children following.There were ever so many things they wished to hear about, which theyhoped he might be going to tell them, but halfway down he turned andpointed. Over south and east a thin blue film of smoke rose up straightfrom the dark forest.

  "That's for you, I think. Your friend, the Onondaga, is signaling you;he knows the end of the story."

  Taking hands, the children ran straight in the direction of the smokesignal, along the trail which opened before them.