After a time there came to the young wife two baby boys. When the twins were five weeks old the mother died. The father was at first dumb with grief for his heart was very heavy. Then looking up toward the heavens he sang,
“I see a hemlock tree. It has but two branches. The tree is twisted in the hurricane and is broken midway. The two remaining branches on the stub are thrashing in the gale. The tree is I. My wife is broken from me and my children are in the storm! Let me burn tobacco, the wind will cease; let me burn tobacco and my sorrow heals. It gives me thought!”
The dead mother had not lain long on her bed of spruce boughs when the hungry babes began to cry. A sudden thought came to the father. He cut down two strings of deer meat and flung them into the mortar. Grasping the pestle he pounded the meat into a powder and soaking it in hot water fed the liquid to his children. For several months they were nourished with this and they grew lusty and fat. When the corn was ripe, “in the milk,” the father scraped the kernels from the cob and pounded them in his mortar, mixed the paste with water, skimmed off the gruel and cooked with venison broth, and thus made a new food upon which the children thrived. When they were a year old they ate the same food that their father did and grew tall and strong.
The years went by and they grew vigorous and lithe and became expert runners often keeping pace with the swiftest of the tribe. At the age of fifteen one of them ran a race with a deer and falling exhausted died. And the father sorrowed again and became melancholy. After the death of his brother the other seemed to double in strength of body and mind. His name was Hahyennoweh meaning the Swift Runner. In this son the father took great pride for it was his sole remaining “branch.” Thus he instructed him in every art known to the hunter and warrior.
Hahyennoweh was a skilled bowman but as he developed greater speed in running he came to believe the bow and arrow coward’s weapons.
“A fight to death and face to face is the only fitting way,” he said.
With this idea in his mind and a sharp flint in his belt, he broke his bows and snapped his arrows. Then when he wished to slay an animal he would pursue it and when it fell exhausted he would wait until it recovered its breath and strength, slit its throat and carry it home. Bear, deer, elk, moose and buffalo all fell victims of his speed.
Like every brave and skillful man he loved to boast of his power, and no one ever made a statement of their skill lest he exclaimed, “Ho, that is nothing! I am braver than that for I am the most skillful of all the tribe!”
The father began to worry about this fault of his son’s, for it was a serious one. His entire conversation was self praise, which while excusable when indulged in occasionally, was unpardonable when continued forever. Wishing to warn him the father spoke to the boastful young warrior. “Son, I am your father, hear me!” he said. “You must not brag or boast yourself hereafter!”
But the son merely laughed and replied, “Father, I do not. I speak truth!”