Ever the young girls sought to bedeck themselves, that they might be fair to look upon, and sometimes they would string red berries upon grass, and hang the loop about the neck, and it was a pretty thing to see. It could last but for a little time, but, while it lasted, it was glittering; and ever Little Toes wore such a necklace and much she grieved that the beautiful thing would wither so soon into hardness and dullness, and of all this Limp knew well. So it came that he conceived a thing that was wondrous. He told me of what he had done. He was walking beside the lake one day, black of mood, thinking of Big Bow, and of how hard his chances were of getting the woman who seemed so fair to him. It was as he walked thus--as he told me--that his eyes rested, at first unseeing, on the shore’s margin, where the creek tumbled into the lake, and where there was a blaze of colouring as the sun shone on the tossed-up shells of white and of a glittering pink of which the lake had many. Somehow they made him think more than ever, if that were possible, of the red berries around the throat of Little Toes. Much he thought, he told me, until, suddenly, he knew what it was that made him see Little Toes with her necklace. The white shells were like her white skin, and the pink shells were like the berries. Then came to him a great idea. He ran up and down the shore, gathering the pink shells and the white ones, and filled his wolfskin pouch with them, and then ran to his cave, and stayed within it long. So it was that for many days I had seen so little of him, and had wondered what he might be doing thus alone. In a hidden place among the rocks near the lake he was at work with bits of sandstone and his drill of the hardest flint, working more eagerly than ever he had worked on spear or arrow-head, and wonderful things began to show in his strong hands as he so laboured. He was most patient, as surely he had need to be. He bored each white shell and each one of the bright pink until there were many of them thus pierced, and then he rounded and polished them until they glittered wondrously when he brought them to the light. He marvelled at them himself. They were wonderful beads. He took a long tendon from the leg of a great elk which we had killed, such tendon as we used for a bowstring, and which would last a lifetime, and upon this he strung the beads, first a pink one and then a white one, and so on to the end. He knotted the ends of the tendon together, in a knot that could not be untied, and then held up before his eyes something which no one had ever seen before--the most glorious shining thing that men had ever known. It was the first necklace that would not shrink and wither. All this Limp told me, and showed me what he had made. It was marvellous. And, after this, the days passed, and he still laboured on the bauble. But no longer did I reproach him about the fish. My heart was with him, my lame companion.