"We should have set out that moment, but a strange lightness came in my head. I do not know just what happened. I think the storm must have begun again early in the afternoon. There was a great roaring as of wind and the girl bending over me, wavering and growing thin like smoke. Twice I saw the great head of the moose thrust among the hemlock boughs, and heard Nukewis urging and calling me. She lifted my hands and clasped them round the antlers of the moose; I could feel his warm breath.... He threw up his head, drawing me from my bed, wonderfully light upon my feet. We seemed to move through the storm. I could feel the hairy shoulder of the moose and across his antlers Nukewis calling me. I felt myself carried along like a thin bubble of life in the storm that poured down from the Adirondack like Niagara. At last I slipped into darkness. "I do not know how long this lasted, but presently I was aware of a light that began to grow and spread around me. It came from the face of the moose, and when I looked up out of my darkness it changed to the face of a great kind man. He had on the headdress of a chief priest, the tall headdress of eagle plumes and antlers. I had hold of one of them, and his arm was around and under me. But I knew very well who held me. "'You have appeared to me at last,' I said to him. "'I have appeared, my son.' His voice was kind as the sound of summer waters. "'I looked for you long, O Taryenya-wagon!' "'You looked for me among your little brothers of the wild,' he said, 'and for you the Vision was among men, my son.' "'How, among men?' "'What you did for that poor girl when you put your good thought between her and harm. That you must do for men.' "'I am to be a Shaman, then?' I thought of my father. "'According to a man's power,' said the Holder of the Heavens,--'as my power comes upon him....'" The Onondaga puffed silently for a while on his pipe. Dorcas Jane fidgeted. "But I don't understand," she said at last; "just what was it that happened?" "It was my Mystery," said the Onondaga; "my Vision that came to me out of the fasting and the sacrifice. You see, there had been very little food since leaving Crooked Water, and Nukewis--" "You gave it all to her." Dorcas nodded. "But still I don't understand?" "The moose had begun to travel down the mountain and like a good brother he came back for me. Nukewis lifted me up and bound me to his antlers, holding me from the other side, but I was too weak to notice. "We must have traveled that way for hours through the storm until we reached the tall woods below the limit of the snow. When I came to myself, I was lying on a bed of fern in a bright morning and Nukewis was cooking quail which she had snared with a slip noose made of her hair. I ate--I could eat now that I had had my Vision--and grew strong. All the upper mountain was white like a tent of deerskin, but where we were there was only thin ice on the edges of the streams.