“He is an evil Manito,” and he looked toward the dead buck; “we must not eat him. You surely made medicine to bring Skookum.”
“Yes, I made medicine with my mouth,” was the answer, “I called, I yelled, when he came at me.”
“It is a long way from here to the cabin,” was Quonab's reply. “I could not hear you; Skookum could not hear you; but Cos Cob, my father, told me that when you send out a cry for help, you send medicine, too, that goes farther than the cry. May be so; I do not know: my father was very wise.”
“Did you see Skookum come, Quonab?”
“No; he was with me hours after you left, but he was restless and whimpered. Then he left me and it was a long time before I heard him bark. It was the 'something-wrong' bark. I went. He brought me here.”
“He must have followed my track all 'round the line.”
After an hour they set out for the cabin. The ravens “Ha-ha-ed” and “Ho-ho-ed” as they went. Quonab took the fateful horn that Rolf had chopped off, and hung it on a sapling with a piece of tobacco and a red yam streamer ', to appease the evil spirit that surely was near. There it hung for years after, until the sapling grew to a tree that swallowed the horn, all but the tip, which rotted away.
Skookum took a final sniff at his fallen enemy, gave the body the customary expression of a dog's contempt, then led the procession homeward.
Not that day, not the next, but on the first day of calm, red, sunset
sky, went Quonab to his hill of worship; and when the little fire that
he lit sent up its thread of smoke, like a plumb-line from the red cloud
over him, he burnt a pinch of tobacco, and, with face and arms upraised
in the red light, he sang a new song:
“The evil one set a trap for my son,
But the Manito saved him;
In the form of a Skookum he saved him.”