“Still, it may not fit her. One must prove herself worthy in order to retain that honorable name.”
“Ugh,” retorts the first grandmother, “she can at least bear it on probation!”
“Tosh, tosh,” the other assents.
Thus the unconscious little Winona has passed the first stage of the Indian’s christening.
Presently she is folded into a soft white doeskin, well lined with the loose down of cattails, and snugly laced into an upright oaken cradle, the front of which is a richly embroidered buckskin bag, with porcupine quills and deers’ hoofs suspended from its profuse fringes. This gay cradle is strapped upon the second grandmother’s back, and that dignitary walks off with the newcomer.
“You must come with me,” she says. “We shall go among the father and mother trees, and hear them speak with their thousand tongues, that you may know their language forever. I will hang the cradle of the woman-child upon Utuhu, the oak; and she shall hear the love-sighs of the pine maiden!”
In this fashion Winona is introduced to nature and becomes at once “nature-born,” in accord with the beliefs and practices of the wild red man.
“Here she is! Take her,” says the old woman on her return from the woods. She presents the child to its mother, who is sitting in the shade of an elm-tree as quietly as if she had not just passed through woman’s severest ordeal in giving a daughter to the brave Chetonska!
“She has a winsome face, as meek and innocent as the face of an ermine,” graciously adds the grandmother.
The mother does not speak. Silently and almost reverently she takes her new and first-born daughter into her arms. She gazes into its velvety little face of a dusky red tint, and unconsciously presses the closely swaddled form to her breast. She feels the mother-instinct seize upon her strongly for the first time. Here is a new life, a new hope, a possible link between herself and a new race!