The Windy Hill

by Cornelia Meigs

THE SEVEN BROTHERS OF THE SUN

Nashola did not live in fairyland, although there were seasons when his country was so beautiful that it might well have belonged to some such enchanted place. He did not know whether he loved it best when the thickets were all in bloom with pink crab apple and the brown, wintry hills had put on their first spring green, or when every valley was scarlet and golden with frost-touched maple trees in the autumn. But to-day it was neither, being hot midsummer, with the wild grass thick and soft on the slope of the hill that he was climbing, and with the heavy foliage of the oak tree on the summit rustling in a hot, fitful breeze. It was high noontide with the sunlight all about him, yet Nashola walked warily and looked back more than once at his comrades who had dared follow him only halfway up the hill. His was no ordinary errand, for, all about him, Nashola felt dangers that he could neither hear nor see. Before him, sitting motionless as a statue, with his back against the trunk of the oak tree and his keen, hawk-like face turned toward the hills and the sky, was Secotan, the sorcerer and medicine man, whom all of Nashola's tribe praised, revered, and dreaded.

None but the full-grown warriors used to venture to have speech with him, and then only as he sat in the door of his lodge, with the men in a half circle before him. They never came alone. Along all the seaboard, the Indians talked of Secotan, the man most potent in spells and charms and prophecies, who was said to talk with strange spirits in his lodge by night and who could call up storms out of the sea at will. This spot at the summit of the hill, where the medicine man sat so often, sometimes muttering spells, sometimes staring straight before him across the valley, was magic forbidden ground, where no one but himself was known to come. Yet the young Nashola, only fifteen years old, and far from being a warrior, had been told that he must consult the medicine man and had been in too much haste to seek him in his own lodge or to wait until he could persuade a comrade to go with him.

Stretched along the river below them was the camp of Nashola's brown-skinned people, where springs gave them fresh water and where the eastern hills of the valley gave shelter from the winter storms that blew in from the sea. Beyond those green hills were rocky slopes, salt swamps, a stretch of yellow sand, and then the great Atlantic rollers, tumbling in upon the beach. The Indians of Nashola's village would go thither sometimes to dig for clams, to fish from the high rocks, and even, on occasions, to swim in the breakers close to shore. But they were land-abiding folk, they feared nothing in the forest, and would launch their canoes in the most headlong rapids of the inland rivers; yet there was dread and awe in their eyes when they looked out upon the sea. Not one of them had ever ventured beyond the island at the mouth of the harbor.

They were a shifting, wandering people, moving here and there with the seasons, as the deer and moose moved their grazing grounds, but their most settled abiding place was this little green valley where they spent a part of every year. Sometimes word would come drifting in, through other tribes, of strange, white-faced men who had landed on their shores, but who always sailed away again, since this was still the time when America was all the Indians' own. What they did not see troubled them little and they went on, undisturbed, hunting and fishing and paying their vows to the spirits and demons that they thought to be masters of their little world.

The old, wrinkled squaw who was Nashola's grandmother was the only one of them all who seemed oppressed with care. The boy, whose parents were dead, was her special charge and was not, as he should be, like other Indian lads. He was slim and swift and was as skillful as his companions with the bow and spear, but he had a strange love for running along the sea beach with the waves snatching at his bare, brown legs, and he was really happy only when he was swimming in the green water. The day he swam to the island and back again, paying no heed to the shouts and warnings of his friends, and declaring, when he landed, that he would have gone farther save that the tide had turned—that day had brought his old grandmother's patience to an end.

"It is not fitting that one of our tribe should be so familiar with the sea," she stormed at him. "We were not born to master that wild salt water; the gods that rule us have said over and over again that the woods and rivers are ours, but that we are to have no dealings with the spirits of the sea. Since I cannot make you listen, you shall talk to some one who will. You shall go to ask the medicine man if what I say is not so."

Nashola had come, therefore, to ask his question, but he found that it needed a bold heart to advance, without quaking, into that silent presence and to speak out with Secotan's black eyes seeming to stare him through and through.

"Is it true," he began, "that men of our tribe should have no trust in the sea? My grandmother says that I should hate it and fear it, but I do not. Must I learn to be afraid?"

Slowly the man nodded.