A man came down the river-bank, moving clumsily in his snow-shoes over the hummocks; a man dressed as an Indian, in blanket-cloak and scarlet mitases. His head was shaven to the crown around a top-knot skewered with heron's feathers; his face painted with black, vermilion, and a single streak of white between the eyebrows. He carried a gun under his left arm, and over his shoulder a pole to which he had slung the bodies of five beavers. Two dogs ran ahead of him straight for the encampment, which he had not discerned until they began to salute it with glad barking.
Five lodges formed the encampment—four of them grouped in a rough semicircle among the main lodge, which stood back close under the sand-bank where an eddy of wind had scooped it comparatively clear of snow.
The hunter followed his dogs to the door of the main lodge and lifted its frozen tent-flap.
"Is it well done, Menehwehna?" he asked, and casting his pole with its load upon the floor he clapped his mittened hands together for warmth. "Ough!" He began to pull the mittens off cautiously.
Menehwehna, seated with his back against the roof-pole (he had lain sick and fasting there all day), looked triumphantly towards his wife, who crouched with her two daughters by the lodge fire.
"Said I not that he would bring us luck? And, being bitten, did they bite, my brother?" he asked mischievously.
"A little. It did not hurt at the time." One of the two girls rose from beside the fire.
"Show me your hands, Netawis," she said.
Netawis—that is to say, John à Cleeve—stretched out his lacerated hands to the firelight. As he did so his blanket-cloak fell back, showing a necklace of wampum about his throat and another looser string dangling against the stained skin of his breast. On his outstretched wrists two silver bangles twinkled, and two broad bands of silver on the upper arms.
The girl fetched a bladder of beaver-fat and anointed his hands, her own trembling a little. Azoka was husband-high, and had been conscious for some weeks of a bird in her breast, which stirred and began to flutter whenever she and Netawis drew close. At first, when he had been fit for little but to make kites for the children, she had despised him and wondered at her father's liking. But Netawis did not seem to care whether folks despised him or not; and this piqued her. Whatever had to be learnt he learned humbly, and now the young men had ceased to speak of him as a good-for-nothing, Azoka began to think that his differing from them was not wholly against him; and all the women acknowledged him to be slim and handsome.