American Museum of Natural History -- Fiction; Indians of North America -- Fiction; Nature stories, American; Western stories
"'Now, I think,' said my friend, when the Lenape had left us with some
question about a hunting-party, which they had evidently invented to
excuse their rudeness, 'that it was for such as these that the scroll
was written.' But we could not understand why Well-Praised should have
gone to all that trouble to let the Lenni-Lenape know that he had called
a Council.
"When we had smoked our last pipe, we were still two or three days from
Three Towns, and we decided to try for a cut-off by a hunting-trail
which Ongyatasse had been over once, years ago, with his father. These
hunting-traces go everywhere through the Tallegewi Country. You can tell
them by the way they fork from the main trails and, after a day or two,
thin into nothing. We traveled well into the night from the place that
Ongyatasse remembered, so as to steer by the stars, and awoke to the
pleasant pricking of adventure. But we had gone half the morning before
we began to be sure that we were followed.
"Jays that squawked and fell silent as we passed, called the alarm again
a few minutes later. A porcupine which we saw, asleep upon a log, woke
up and came running from behind us. We thought of the Lenni-Lenape.
Where a bare surface of rock across our path made it possible to turn
out without leaving a track, we stole back a few paces and waited.
Presently we made out, through the thick leaves, a youth, about our age
we supposed, for his head was not cropped and he was about the height of
Ongyatasse. When we had satisfied ourselves that he was alone, we took
pleasure in puzzling him. As soon as he missed our tracks in the trail,
he knew that he was discovered and played quarry to our fox very
craftily. For an hour or two we stalked one another between the buckeye
boles, and then I stepped on a rotten log which crumbled and threw me
noisily. The Lenape let fly an arrow in our direction. We were nearing a
crest of a ridge where the underbrush thinned out, and as soon as we had
a glimpse of his naked legs slipping from tree to tree, Ongyatasse made
a dash for him. We raced like deer through the still woods, Ongyatasse
gaining on the flying figure, and I about four laps behind him. A low
branch swished blindingly across my eyes for a moment, and when I could
look again, the woods were suddenly still and empty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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