It was the season that he loved, when dim forest and hazy fernland spoke most impellingly. The tamaracks talked to him, the poplars bowed as he passed, and the pines sang for him alone. The dying vines twined about his feet and clung to him, and the brown ferns, curling sadly, waved him a welcome that was a farewell. A bird twittered a plaintive note and a loon whistled a lonely call. Across the wide gray hollows and meadows of white moss moaned the north wind, bending all before it, blowing full into Siena’s face with its bitter promise. The lichen-covered rocks and the rugged-barked trees and the creatures that moved among them--the whole world of earth and air heard Siena’s step on the rustling leaves and a thousand voices hummed in the autumn stillness. So he passed through the shadowy forest and over the gray muskeg flats to his hunting place. With his birch-bark horn he blew the call of the moose. He alone of hunting Indians had the perfect moose call. There, hidden within a thicket, he waited, calling and listening till an angry reply bellowed from the depths of a hollow, and a bull moose, snorting fight, came cracking the saplings in his rush. When he sprang fierce and bristling into the glade, Siena killed him. Then, laying his shooting stick over a log, he drew his knife and approached the beast. A snapping of twigs alarmed Siena and he whirled upon the defensive, but too late to save himself. A band of Indians pounced upon him and bore him to the ground. One wrestling heave Siena made, then he was overpowered and bound. Looking upward, he knew his captors, though he had never seen them before; they were the lifelong foes of his people, the fighting Crees. A sturdy chief, bronze of face and sinister of eye, looked grimly down upon his captive. “Baroma makes Siena a slave.” * * * * * Siena and his tribe were dragged far southward to the land of the Crees. The young chief was bound upon a block in the center of the village where hundreds of Crees spat upon him, beat him, and outraged him in every way their cunning could devise. Siena’s gaze was on the north and his face showed no sign that he felt the torments. At last Baroma’s old advisers stopped the spectacle, saying: “This is a man!” Siena and his people became slaves of the Crees. In Baroma’s lodge, hung upon caribou antlers, was the wonderful shooting stick with Siena’s powder horn and bullet pouch, objects of intense curiosity and fear. None knew the mystery of this lightning-flashing, thunder-dealing thing; none dared touch it. The heart of Siena was broken; not for his shattered dreams or the end of his freedom, but for his people. His fame had been their undoing. Slaves to the murderers of his forefathers! His spirit darkened, his soul sickened; no more did sweet voices sing to him on the wind, and his mind dwelt apart from his body among shadows and dim shapes.