In a short time the boy awakened, being in great pain. He arose and went out of the lodge. Near the creek he found a sweat lodge and as he stood near it a voice spoke: “Go in,” it said. “I will help you.” He looked and there saw another person exactly like himself, only very white and clear. “I have always known you were my friend,” said Gajihsondis. “But this time I see you.”
Gajihsondis went into the lodge and took a sweat, and when the arrows had come out he took an emetic. After a while he saw clearly in the dark. He saw his friend walk toward him and enter his body. The two became one. “This is the power that has guided me,” he thought. “But I will never tell anyone I have seen him, until the day I am about to die.”
Thereupon he returned to the lodge and awoke his grandfather. “Come and fight me, grandfather,” he exclaimed. “I believe that you have done me a great wrong.”
The old man sprang from his bed and as he did so the prisoner became as a mist and floated into him. Then the grandfather grasped his war club but it was no longer strong like good hickory, but soft like wet rawhide. He could not fight.
He began to whimper. “Oh, my grandson,” he moaned. “Do not kill your grandfather. My strength is gone. I will confess. I have been a great wizard and have created many evil monsters and slain many people by magic. Now I am undone. Oh restore my nature and make me human again. Do not kill me.”
“Then tell me everything,” demanded Gajihsondis, and the old man told him of his conjuring. The girl, he said, was fore-ordained as Gajihsondis’ wife, his parents were in the ground back of the lodge in the clearing. He had exercised his magic in order to claim the girl. He and the old man in the house in the clearing were one and the same person, though dual by magic. The path was well trodden because he had traveled over it so many times.
“I must now go out and kill all the monsters,” said Gajihsondis. He did so and killed all the magically evil creatures. He dug up the ground back of the lodge in the clearing and there found a bark house hidden by the roots of the trees. There he found his mother, his father and his sister. All were very happy that Gajihsondis had released them and together they made their journey back to the grandfather’s lodge. When he saw them returning he died and turned into a shriveled human skin. This Gajihsondis rolled into a bundle and hid it in the rafters. Then he called to the girl and she came out of the blankets from the bed at the far side of the lodge. She was a beautiful young woman and dressed in fine garments.
“Who is this?” asked Gajihsondis’s father and mother.
“This is my wife,” he replied. “We shall all live in a new house.”
So he took them all away and he showed them a new lodge of bark he had built. So this is the story of Gajihsondis.