They had wandered a long way and were crying with fear and hunger when they heard some one chopping wood in the distance. “Perhaps it is really he,” said the elder sister, and they followed the sound.
There stood a man whose face was painted red. He was kind and asked the girls what they were doing so far from home.
As soon as they had told him, he invited them into his house near by, and they found it large and well stored with abundance of meat. They remained there as he asked them, and the elder sister in time became his wife.
Now the mother had soon repented her hasty speech and both parents searched everywhere for their daughters. When they could not find them, they mourned them as dead. A year passed, and the mourners’ feast had been given, when one day Mountain Dweller said to his wife and his sister-in-law: “Wouldn’t you like to see your father and mother again?”
“Oh, yes, yes!” exclaimed the little girl, but the other thought not, for the insult was hard to forgive. At last she consented to go, whereupon her husband hunted continually and prepared a large quantity of meat for a present to his father-in-law.
“Make a little basket, no larger than the end of your thumb,” he told her; and when it was finished, he put into it all those canoe loads of meat, hung it on his finger, and the three of them went down the mountain to the old home of the two girls.
Their little brother was playing outside the hut and saw them first. He ran inside. “Mother, mother!” he cried, “my two sisters are coming!”
“Nonsense,” scolded his mother. “Your sisters have been dead a long time, as you well know. Did we not give the mourners’ feast for them this last moon?”
“Nevertheless I ought to know my own sisters, and I do know them,” the boy persisted. “They are coming—they are here!”
The mother came to the door and saw them, and instantly she threw herself upon their necks, crying for joy.