So the lovers were reunited. Then
... Squ’tes and Mipis
Lived all the summer upon the mountain,
Sung in its shadows and shone in the sunshine.
Still as of yore they are singing and shining;
And so it will be while the mountain is there.
A very curious feature of this delicate romance, which reminds one of the love-story of the Nightingale and the Rose, is the transposition of sex. To our minds it would seem natural that the bird, as the most active of the two characters, should take the male part and the leaf the other; and it is false to fact that Red Bird, as a female, should sing. The Indians must have known that this was unnatural, yet their poetic sense arranged it otherwise, just as the poets have pictured the nightingale pressing her breast against a thorn, yet singing, as only male birds do!
Elsewhere I have shown how important a part the loon plays in the mythology and fireside tales of the redmen of the Northeastern region of our country and that of the Great Lakes. To the Algonkins of Maine and eastward this bird was the messenger of their great hero Glooscap, or Kuloskap, as Leland spells it with careful accuracy when writing in the language of the Pasamaquoddies; and he has told in verse the story of how this service was accepted by the willing bird. One day when Kuloskap was pursuing the gigantic magician, Winpe, his enemy, a flock of loons came circling near him, and to his question to their leader: “What is thy will, O Kwimu?” the loon replied: “I fain would be thy servant, thy servant and thy friend.” Then the Master taught the loons a cry, a strange, prolonged cry, like the howl of a dog when he calls to the moon, or when, far away in the forest, he seeks to find his master; and he instructed them to utter this weird summons whenever they required him.
Now it came to pass long after, the Master in Uktakumkuk
(The which is Newfoundland) came to an Indian village,