"On one of these occasions, caught by a sudden storm, they hugged themselves for three days and ate what food they had, mouthful by mouthful, while the snow slid past them straight and sodden. It closed smooth over the tree where their house was, to the middle branches. Two days more they waited until the sun by day and the cold at night had made a crust over the fresh fall. On the second day they saw something moving in the middle of the Canyon. Half a dozen wild geese had been caught in one of the wind currents that race like rivers about the High Places of the World, and dropped exhausted into the Trap. Now they rose heavily; but, starved and blinded, they could not pitch their flight to that great height. Round and round they beat, and back they dropped from the huge mountain-heads, bewildered. Finally, the leader rose alone higher and higher in that thin atmosphere until the watchers almost lost him, and then, exhausted, shot downward to the ledge where Howkawanda and Younger Brother hugged themselves in the shelter of a wind-driven drift. They could see the gander's body shaken all over with the pumping of his heart as Younger Brother took him hungrily by the neck. "'Nay, Brother,' said Howkawanda, 'but I also have been counted dead, and it is in my heart that this one shall serve us better living than dead.' He nursed the great white bird in his bosom and fed it with the last of their food and a little snow-water melted in his palm. In an hour, rested and strengthened, the bird rose again, beating a wide circle slowly and steadily upward, until, with one faint honk of farewell, it sailed slowly out of sight between the peaks, sure of its direction. "'That way,' said Howkawanda, 'lies Dead Man's Journey.' "When they came back over the same trail a year later, they were frightened to see what steeps and crevices they had covered. But for that first trip the snow-crust held firm while they made straight for the gap in the peaks through which the wild goose had disappeared. They traveled as long as the light lasted, though their hearts sobbed and shook with the thin air and the cold. "The drifts were thinner, and the rocks came through with clusters of wind-slanted cedars. By nightfall snow began again, and they moved, touching, for they could not see an arm's length and dared not stop lest the snow cover them. And the hair along the back of Younger Brother began to prick. "'Here I die, indeed,' said Howkawanda at last, for he suffered most because of his naked skin. He sank down in the soft snow at Younger Brother's shoulder. "'Up, Master,' said Younger Brother, 'I hear something.' "'It is the Storm Spirit singing my death song,' said Howkawanda. But the coyote took him by the neck of his deerskin shirt and dragged him a little. "'Now,' he said, 'I smell something.'