For a long time the trail was pleasant, but toward evening they came to a wide bed of cactus, and the plume passed over as swiftly as ever, but the young man’s moccasins were soon torn and his feet and legs cruelly lacerated with the cactus spines; yet still he pursued the red plume until the pain seemed to sting his whole body, and he gasped and wailed: “Ah, my beautiful wife, wait for me; do wait, for I love thee and will not leave thee!” Then the plume stopped beyond the plain of cactus and waited until he had passed through, but not longer, for ere he had plucked all the needles of the cactus from his bleeding feet, it floated on, and he lifted himself up and followed until at evening the maiden again waited and bade him “Sit down and rest.”
That night she seemed to pity him, and once more spoke to him: “Yo á! My lover, my husband, turn back, oh, turn back! for the way is long and untrodden, and thy heart is but weak and is mortal. I go to the Council of Dead Ones, and how can the living there enter?”
But the youth only wept, and begged that she let him go with her. “For, ah,” said he, “my beautiful wife, my beautiful bride, I love thee and cannot turn from thee!”
And she smiled only and shook her head sadly as she replied: “Yo á! It shall be as thou willest. It may be thy heart will not wither, for tomorrow is one more day onward, and then down the trail to the waters wherein stands the ladder of others, shall I lead thee to wait me forever.”
At mid-sun on the day after, the plume led the way straight to a deep cañon, the walls of which were so steep that no man could pass them alive. For a moment the red plume paused above the chasm, and the youth pressed on and stretched his hand forth to detain it; but ere he had gained the spot, it floated on straight over the dark cañon, as though no ravine had been there at all; for to spirits the trails that once have been, even though the waters have worn them away, still are.
Wildly the young man rushed up and down the steep brink, and despairingly he called across to the plume: “Alas! ah, my beautiful wife! Wait, only wait for me, for I love thee and cannot turn from thee!” Then, like one whose thoughts wandered, he threw himself over the brink and hung by his hands as if to drop, when a jolly little striped Squirrel, who was playing at the bottom of the cañon, happened to see him, and called out: “Tsithl! Tsithl!” and much more, which meant “Ah hai! Wananí!” “You crazy fool of a being! You have not the wings of a falcon, nor the hands of a Squirrel, nor the feet of a spirit, and if you drop you will be broken to pieces and the moles will eat up the fragments! Wait! Hold hard, and I will help you, for, though I am but a Squirrel, I know how to think!”
Whereupon the little chit ran chattering away and called his mate out of their house in a rock-nook: “Wife! Wife! Come quickly; run to our corn room and bring me a hemlock, and hurry! hurry! Ask me no questions; for a crazy fool of a man over here will break himself to pieces if we don’t quickly make him a ladder.”
So the little wife flirted her brush in his face and skipped over the rocks to their store-house, where she chose a fat hemlock and hurried to her husband who was digging a hole in the sand underneath where the young man was hanging. Then they spat on the seed, and buried it in the hole, and began to dance round it and sing,—
“Kiäthlä tsilu,
Silokwe, silokwe, silokwe;