The passing of the river leaves its memories of musical ripplings over pebbly shoals, murmurous runes among the fallen timber, tremulous moon paths over darkened waters, the twinkling of wispy hosts of fireflies in dreamy dusks, blended perfumes of still forests, heron haunted bayous, enchanting islands, with their profusion of wild grapes and plums, and the glories of afterglows beyond the vast marshes.
The currents that once widened in silvery magnificence to their natural barriers, and wandered peacefully among the mysteries of the woods, now flow madly on through a man-wrought channel. In sorrow the gloomy waters flee with writhing swirls from the land where once they crept out over the low areas and rested on their ways to the sea. In the moaning of the homeless tide we may hear the requiem of the river.
Fields of corn and wheat stretch over the reclaimed acres, for the utilitarian has triumphed over beauty and nature’s providence for her wild creatures. The destruction of one of the most valuable bird refuges on the continent has almost been completed, for the sake of immediate wealth. The realization of this great economic wrong must be left to future generations. The ugly dredges are finishing the desecration on the lower reaches of the stream.
The Vanishing River moves on through a twilight of ignorance and error, for the sacrifice of our bird life and our regions of natural beauty is the sacrifice of precious material and spiritual gifts.
In the darkness of still nights pale phantom currents may creep into the denuded winding channels, guided by the unseen Power that directs the waters, and fade into the dim mists before the dawn.
Under the brooding care of the Great Spirit for the departed children, ghostly war plumes may flutter softly among the leaves and tassels of the corn that wave over the Red Man’s lost domain, when the autumn winds whisper in the star-lit fields, for the land is peopled with shadows, and has passed into the realm of legend, romance and fancy.
II
THE SILVER ARROW
The story of the arrow was slowly unravelled from the tangled thread of interrupted narrative related to us by old Waukena. She sat in her little log hut among the tall poplars and birches, beyond the farther end of Whippoorwill Bayou, and talked of the arrow during our visits, but never in a way that enabled us to connect the scattered fragments of the tale into proper sequence until we had heard various parts of it many times.
She was a remnant of the Pottowattomies. She did not know when she was born, but, from her knowledge of events that happened in her lifetime, the approximate dates of which we knew, she must have been over ninety.
Her solitary life and habitual silence had developed a taciturnity that steals upon those who dwell in the stillness of the forest. There was a far away look in the old eyes, and a tinge of bitterness in her low voice, as she talked sadly in her broken English, of the days that were gone.