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The Trail Book

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THE TRAIL BOOK

BY

MARY AUSTIN

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY MILO WINTER

1918








[Illustration: "'Arr-rr-ump!' I said"]



TO MARY, MY NIECE

IN THE HOPE THAT SHE MAY FIND THROUGH THE TRAILS OF HER OWN COUNTRY THE
ROAD TO WONDERLAND CONTENTS




I HOW OLIVER AND DORCAS JANE FOUND THE TRAIL

II WHAT THE BUFFALO CHIEF TOLD

III HOW THE MASTODON HAPPENED FIRST TO BELONG TO A MAN, AS TOLD BY
ARRUMPA

IV THE SECOND PART OF THE MASTODON STORY, CONCERNING THE TRAIL TO THE
SEA AND THE TALKING STICK OF TAKU-WAKIN

V HOW HOWKAWANDA AND FRIEND-AT-THE-BACK FOUND THE TRAIL TO THE BUFFALO
COUNTRY; TOLD BY THE COYOTE

VI DORCAS JANE HEARS HOW THE CORN CAME TO THE VALLEY OF THE MISSI-SIPPU;
TOLD BY THE CORN WOMAN

VII A TELLING OF THE SALT TRAIL, OF TSE-TSE-YOTE AND THE DELIGHT-MAKERS;
TOLD BY MOKE-ICHA

VIII YOUNG-MAN-WHO-NEVER-TURNS-BACK: A TELLING OF THE TALLEGEWI, BY ONE
OF THEM

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

X THE MAKING OF A SHAMAN: A TELLING OF THE IROQUOIS TRAIL, BY THE
ONONDAGA

XI THE PEARLS OF COFACHIQUE: HOW LUCAS DE AYLLON CAME TO LOOK FOR THEM
AND WHAT THE CACICA FAR-LOOKING DID TO HIM; TOLD BY THE PELICAN.

XII HOW THE IRON SHIRTS CAME TO TUSCALOOSA: A TELLING OF THE TRIBUTE
ROAD BY THE LADY OF COFACHIQUE.

XIII HOW THE IRON SHIRTS CAME LOOKING FOR THE SEVEN CITIES OF CIBOLA;
TOLD BY THE ROAD-RUNNER.

XIV HOW THE MAN OF TWO HEARTS KEPT THE SECRET OF THE HOLY PLACES; TOLD
BY THE CONDOR.

XV HOW THE MEDICINE OF THE ARROWS WAS BROKEN AT REPUBLICAN RIVER; TOLD
BY THE CHIEF OFFICER OF THE DOG SOLDIERS


APPENDIX

GLOSSARY




ILLUSTRATIONS


"'ARR-RR-UMP!' I SAID"

THE BUFFALO CHIEF

THE MASTODON

TAKU AND ARRUMPA

THE TRAIL TO THE SEA

THE TRAIL TO THE BUFFALO COUNTRY

SHOT DOWNWARD TO THE LEDGE WHERE HOWKAWANDA AND YOUNGER BROTHER HUGGED
THEMSELVES (in color)

THE CORN WOMEN

SIGN OF THE SUN AND THE FOUR QUARTERS

MOKE-ICHA

TSE-TSE-YOTE AND MOKE-ICHA (in Color)

TSE-TSE-YOTE AND MOKE-ICHA

THE MOUND-BUILDERS

THE IROQUOIS TRAIL

THE GOLD-SEEKERS

SHE COULD SEE THE THOUGHTS OF A MAN WHILE THEY WERE STILL IN HIS HEART
(in Color)

THE CACICA FAR-LOOKING MEETS THE IRON SHIRTS

THE DESERT

THE CONDOR THAT HAS HIS NEST ON EL MORRO

THE DOG SOLDIERS

LINE ART OF BUFFALO

THE TRAIL BOOK




I

HOW OLIVER AND DORCAS JANE FOUND THE TRAIL


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 sitting for some time in front of the Buffalo case,
wondering what might be at the other end of the trail. The cows that
stood midway in it had such a _going_ look. He was sure it must lead,
past the hummock where the old bull flourished his tail, to one of those
places where he had always wished to be. All at once, as the boy sat
there thinking about it, the glass case disappeared and the trail shot
out like a dark snake over a great stretch of rolling, grass-covered
prairie.

He could see the tops of the grasses stirring like the hair on the old
Buffalo's coat, and the ripple of water on the beaver pool which was
just opposite and yet somehow only to be reached after long travel
through the Buffalo Country. The wind moved on the grass, on the surface
of the water and the young leaves of the alders, and over all the
animals came the start and stir of life.

And then the slow, shuffling steps of the Museum attendant startled it
all into stillness again.

The attendant spoke to Oliver as he passed, for even a small boy is
worth talking to when you have been all day in a Museum where nothing is
new to you and nobody comes.

"You want to look out, son," said the attendant, who really liked the
boy and hadn't a notion what sort of ideas he was putting into Oliver's
head. "If you ain't careful, some of them things will come downstairs
some night and go off with ye."

And why should MacShea have said that if he hadn't known for certain
that the animals _did_ come alive at night? That was the way Oliver put
it when he was trying to describe this extraordinary experience to
his sister.

Dorcas Jane, who was eleven and a half and not at all imaginative, eyed
him suspiciously. Oliver had such a way of stating things that were not
at all believable, in a way that made them seem the likeliest things in
the world. He was even capable of acting for days as if things were so,
which you knew from the beginning were only the most delightful of
make-believes. Life on this basis was immensely more exciting, but then
you never knew whether or not he might be what some of his boy friends
called "stringing you," so when Oliver began to hint darkly at his
belief that the stuffed animals in the Mammal room of the Museum came
alive at night and had larks of their own, Dorcas Jane offered the most
noncommittal objection that occurred to her.

"They couldn't," she said; "the night watchman wouldn't let them." There
were watchmen, she knew, who went the rounds of every floor.

But, insisted Oliver, why should they have watchmen at all, if not to
prevent people from breaking in and disturbing the animals when they
were busy with affairs of their own? He meant to stay up there himself
some night and see what it was all about; and as he went on to explain
how it would be possible to slip up the great stair while the watchmen
were at the far end of the long hall, and of the places one could hide
if the watchman came along when he wasn't wanted, he said "we" and "us."
For, of course, he meant to take Dorcas Jane with him. Where would be
the fun of such an adventure if you had it alone? And besides, Oliver
had discovered that it was not at all difficult to scare himself with the
things he had merely imagined. There were times when Dorcas Jane's frank
disbelief was a great comfort to him. Still, he wasn't the sort of boy
to be scared before anything has really happened, so when Dorcas Jane
suggested that they didn't know what the animals might do to any one who
went among them uninvited, he threw it off stoutly.

"Pshaw! They can't do anything to us! They're stuffed, Silly!"

And to Dorcas Jane, who was by this time completely under the spell of
the adventure, it seemed quite likely that the animals should be stuffed
so that they couldn't hurt you, and yet not stuffed so much that they
couldn't come alive again.

It was all of a week before they could begin. There is a kind of feeling
you have to have about an adventure without which the affair doesn't
come off properly. Anybody who has been much by himself in the woods has
had it; or sometime, when you are all alone in the house, all at once
there comes a kind of pricking of your skin and a tightness in your
chest, not at all unpleasant, and a kind of feeling that the furniture
has its eye on you, or that some one behind your shoulder is about to
speak, and immediately after that something happens. Or you feel sure it
would have happened if somebody hadn't interrupted.

Dorcas Jane _never_ had feelings like that. But about a week after
Oliver had proposed to her that they spend a part of the night in the
long gallery, he was standing in front of the Buffalo case, wondering
what actually did happen when a buffalo caught you. Quite unexpectedly,
deep behind the big bull's glassy eye, he caught a gleam as of another
eye looking at him, meaningly, and with a great deal of friendliness.
Oliver felt prickles come out suddenly all over his body, and without
quite knowing why, he began to move away from that place, tip-toe and
slippingly, like a wild creature in the woods when it does not know who
may be about. He told himself it would never do to have the animals come
alive without Dorcas Jane, and before all those stupid, staring folk who
might come in at any minute and spoil everything.

That night, after their father had gone off clanking to his furnaces,
Dorcas heard her brother tapping on the partition between their rooms,
as he did sometimes when they played "prisoner." She knew exactly what
he meant by it and tapped back that she was ready.

Everything worked out just as they had planned. They heard the strange,
hollow-sounding echoes of the watchman's voice dying down the halls, as
stair by stair they dropped the street lamps below them, and saw strange
shadows start out of things that were perfectly harmless and familiar
by day.

There was no light in the gallery except faint up-and-down glimmers from
the glass of the cases, and here and there the little spark of an eye.
Outside there was a whole world of light, the milky way of the street
with the meteor roar of the Elevated going by, processions of small
moons marching below them across the park, and blazing constellations in
the high windows opposite. Tucked into one of the window benches between
the cases, the children seemed to swing into another world where almost
anything might happen. And yet for at least a quarter of an hour
nothing did.

"I don't believe nothing ever does," said Dorcas Jane, who was not at
all careful of her grammar.

"Sh-sh!" said Oliver. They had sat down directly in front of the Buffalo
Trail, though Dorcas would have preferred to be farther away from the
Polar Bear. For suppose it hadn't been properly stuffed! But Oliver had
eyes only for the trail.

"I want to see where it begins and where it goes," he insisted.

So they sat and waited, and though the great building was never allowed
to grow quite cold, it was cool enough to make it pleasant for them to
sit close together and for Dorcas to tuck her hand into the crook of
his arm....

All at once the Bull Buffalo shook himself.

[Illustration: Line Art of Mastadons]




II

WHAT THE BUFFALO CHIEF TOLD


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

"Wake! Wa--ake!"

It rolled along the ground like thunder. At the sound the herds gathered
themselves from the prairie, they turned back from the licks, they rose
up _plop_ from the wallows, trotting singly in the trails that rayed out
to 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 words
to "_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 the
place of the favorite next to the leader.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But where do they go?" said Dorcas.

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

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

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

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

This was not altogether kind, for it is well known that it is only when
snow has lain long enough on the ground to pack and have a hard coating
of ice, that the buffaloes dare trust themselves upon it. When it is
new-fallen and soft they flounder about helplessly until they die of
starvation, and the wolves pull them down, or the Indians come and kill
them. But the old bull had the privilege which belongs to greatness, of
not being obliged to answer impertinent things that were said to him. He
went on just as if nothing had interrupted, telling how the buffalo
trails had found the mountain passes and how they were rutted deep into
the earth by the migrating herds.

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

"Also," purred Moke-icha, "I have heard that they found trails through
lands where no buffalo had been before them." Moke-icha, the Puma, lay
on a brown boulder that matched so perfectly with her watered coat that
if it had not been for the ruffling of the wind on her short fur and the
twitchings 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, streaked
with black lava and purple shadow. Far at the other end it lifted in
red, wall-sided buttes where the homes of the Cliff People stuck like
honeycombs in the wind-scoured hollows.

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

Even as she spoke they could see the people coming out of the Cliff
dwellings and the priests going into the kivas preparing for
the 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 the
beginning of the buffalo trail in front of them, and around them, drawn
there by that something of himself which every man puts into the work of
his hands, the listening tribesmen. One of these spoke now in answer to
Moke-icha.

"Also in my part of the country," he said, "long before there were Pale
Faces, there were trade trails and graded ways, and walled ways between
village and village. We traded for cherts as far south as Little River
in the Tenasas Mountains, and north to the Sky-Blue Water for copper
which was melted out of rocks, and there were workings at Flint Ridge
that were older than the great mound at Cahokia."

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

He was probably not any taller than the other Indians, but seemed so on
account of his feather headdress which was built up in front with a
curious cut-out copper ornament. They thought they recognized the broad
banner stone of greenish slate which he carried, the handle of which was
tasseled with turkey beards and tiny tails of ermine. He returned the
children's stare in the friendliest possible fashion, twirling his
banner 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 trails
were old before the buffalo had crossed east of the Missi-Sippu, the
Father 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 pointed
to the moose and wapiti trooping down the shallow hills to the
watering-places. They moved with a dancing motion, and the multitude of
their horns was like a forest walking, a young forest in the spring
before the leaves are out and there is a clicking of antlered bough on
bough. "They would come in twenty abreast to the licks where we lay in
wait 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 voice
that seemed to come from high up in the air, so that they all looked up
suddenly and would have been frightened at the huge bulk, if the voice
coming from it in a squeaky whisper had not made it seem ridiculous. It
was the Mastodon, who had strolled in from the pre-historic room, though
it was a wonder to the children how so large a beast could move
so silently.

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

"I've a perfect right to come," said the Mastodon, shuffling
embarrassedly from foot to foot. "I was the first of my kind to have a
man 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 who
began the party. The old bull pawed dust and blew steam from his
nostrils, which was a perfectly safe thing to do in case the story
didn't turn out to his liking.

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

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




III

HOW THE MASTODON HAPPENED FIRST TO BELONG TO A MAN, 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, and the water
rotting the land until there was no knowing where it was safe treading
from year to year. Not that it mattered to my people. We kept to the
hills where there was plenty of good browse, and left the swamp to the
Grass-Eaters--bunt-headed, woolly-haired eaters of grass!"

Up came Arrumpa's trunk to trumpet his contempt, and out from the
hillslope like a picture on a screen stretched for a moment the flat
reed-bed of Two Rivers, with great herds of silly, elephant-looking
creatures feeding there, with huge incurving trunks and backs that
sloped absurdly from a high fore-hump. They rootled in the tall grass or
shouldered in long, snaky lines through the canes, their
trunks waggling.

"Mammoths they were called," said Arrumpa, "and they hid in the swamp
because their tusks curved in and they were afraid of Saber-Tooth, the
Tiger. There were a great many of them, though not so many as our
people, and also there was Man. It was the year my tusks began to grow
that I first saw him. We were coming up from the river to the
bedding-ground and there was a thin rim of the moon like a tusk over the
hill's shoulder. I remember the damp smell of the earth and the good
smell of the browse after the sun goes down, and between them a thin
blue mist curling with a stinging smell that made prickles come along
the back of my neck.

"'What is that?' I said, for I walked yet with my mother.

"'It is the smell which Man makes so that other people may know where he
is and keep away from him,' she said, for my mother had never been
friends with Man and she did not know any better.

"Then we came up over the ridge and saw them, about a score, naked and
dancing on the naked front of the hill. They had a fire in their midst
from which the blue smell went up, and as they danced they sang--

"'Hail, moon, young moon!
Hail, hail, young moon!
Bring me something that I wish,
Hail, moon, hail!'

"--catching up fire-sticks in their hands and tossing them toward the
tusk of the moon. That was how they made the moon grow, by working fire
into it, so my man told me afterwards. But it was not until I began to
walk by myself that he found me.

"I had come up from the lower hills all one day," said the Mastodon.
"There was a feel in the air as if the Great Cold had breathed into it.
It curdled blue as pond water, and under the blueness the forest color
showed like weed under water. I walked by myself and did not care who
heard me. Now and then I tore up a young tree, for my tusks had grown
fast that year and it was good to feel the tree tug at its roots and
struggle with me. Farther up, the wind walked on the dry leaves with a
sound like a thousand wapiti trooping down the mountain. Every little
while, for want of something to do, I charged it. Then I carried a pine,
which I had torn up, on my tusks, until the butt struck a boulder which
went down the hill with an avalanche of small stones that set all the
echoes shouting.

"In the midst of it I lifted up my voice and said that I was I, Arrumpa,
walking by myself,--and just then a dart struck me. The men had come up
under cover of the wind on either side so that there was nothing for me
to do but to move forward, which I did, somewhat hurriedly.

"I had not come to my full size then, but I was a good weight for my
years," said Arrumpa modestly,--"a very good weight, and it was my
weight that saved me, for the edge of the ravine that opened suddenly in
front of me crumbled, so that I came down into the bottom of it with a
great mass of rubbish and broken stone, with a twisted knee, and very
much astonished.

"I remember blowing to get the blood and dust out of my eyes,--there was
a dart stuck in my forehead,--and seeing the men come swarming over the
edge of the ravine, which was all walled in on every side, shaking their
spears and singing. That was the way with men; whatever they did they
had to sing about it. 'Ha-ahe-ah!' they sang--

"'Great Chief, you're about to die,
The Gods have said it.'

"So they came capering, but there was blood in my eyes and my knee hurt
me, so when one of them stuck his spear almost up to the haft in my
side, I tossed him. I took him up lightly on my tusks and he lay still
at the far end of the ravine where I had dropped him. That stopped the
shouting; but it broke out again suddenly, for the women had come down
the wild vines on the walls, with their young on their shoulders, and
the wife of the man I had tossed found him. The noise of the hunters was
as nothing to the noise she made at me. Madness overtook her; she left
off howling over her man and seizing her son by the hand,--he was no
more than half-grown, not up to my shoulder,--she pushed him in front of
me. 'Take him! Take my son, Man-Killer!' she screamed. 'After you have
taken the best of the tribe, will you stop at a youngling?' Then all the
others screeched at her like gulls frightened from their rock, and
stopped silent in great fear to see what I would do about it.

"I did not know what to do, for there was no way I could tell her I was
sorry I had killed her husband; and the lad stood where she had pushed
him, not making any noise at all but a sharp, steady breathing. So I
took him up in my trunk, for, indeed, I did not know what to do, and as
I held him at the level of my eyes, I saw a strange thing,--that the boy
was not afraid. He was not in the least afraid, but very angry.

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