But the boy would take no notice of his tormentors, walking on sullen and silent. He lived in a little world of his own, which was isolated from the great world by the unkindness of his people, like a range of frozen hills; and in this small world there were but three dwellers: Gunthai, a tame grey wolf, and one other. That other was a despised little cripple and her name was Tabea (Frog). These three, and about them the chromatic glory of dreams like a sunrise that lingers—this was the world of Nu Zhinga. All day amid the quiet of the summer hills Nu Zhinga and Tabea played together; he telling of the great indefinite things that he would do in that big mysterious sometime when the days would be pregnant with wonders! For in his soul the pulse of uncertain but lofty resolve bounded, and as he peered into the future, lo! it was vast, yet dim with misty possibilities like a broad stretch of prairie expanding under the new moon! And she, with all of her crooked little body attentive, listened and believed even more than she heard; which is the way of those who love. And then these two, after the manner of children, would play at life, building a tepee with willows from a convenient creek; and Tabea would groan as she bore the heavy burdens, thus showing how she would toil for him and suffer. Then when the tepee was built, she would go about droning a song, with her back bent as with the weight of an infant, thus showing how she would carry the child of Nu Zhinga in that big and sunlit sometime. One day when the last white footstep of the winter had vanished from the coldest valley, the old woman Gunthai laid aside a finished basket and called her boy to her side. “It is the time,” she said; “the time is ripe with summers. Nu Zhinga must eat no meat for four days; then he must go to the hill where the visions come, that he may know what is to be for him in the light of the unborn moons.” So Nu Zhinga ate no meat for four days, and when the fourth evening came, as the fires roared upward among the circled lodges, he passed through the village and took his way to the high hill of dreams. It was the time when the valleys are loud with the song of frogs and when the Earth begins to learn anew the pleasant lesson of the Sun. When he had stopped, breathless with toiling up the long incline, for he was weak with hunger, he turned and looked back upon the jumbled village and saw, indistinctly through the mist of the evening, his mother standing before the door of her lodge, straining her gaze that she might see her boy for the last time, climbing to the height where the dream awaited, that should send him back a man with a future big in deeds.