“Hurry up, grandmother,” said the boy, “and paint me as frightfully as you can.”
“All right, my son; I will help you!” So she blackened the right side of his face with soot, and painted the left side with ashes, until he looked like a veritable demon. Then she gave him a stone axe of ancient time and magic power, and she said: “Take this, my son, and see what you can do with it.”
The boy ran back to the mountain. The Bear was wandering around eating datilas. The boy suddenly ran toward him, and exclaimed:
“Ai yaaaa!
He! he! he! he! he! he! he! tooh!”—
and he whacked the side of a hollow piñon tree with his axe. The tree was shivered with a thundering noise, the earth shook, and the Bear jumped as if he had been struck by one of the flying splinters. Then, recovering himself and catching sight of the boy, he exclaimed: “What a fool I am, to be scared by that little wretch of a boy!” But presently, seeing the boy’s face, he was startled again, and exclaimed: “By my eyes, the Death Demon is after me, surely!”
Again the boy, as he came near, whacked with his magic axe the body of another tree, calling out in a still louder voice. The earth shook so much and the noise was so thunderous that the Bear sneezed with agitation. And again, as the boy came still nearer, once more he struck a tree a tremendous blow, and again the earth thundered and trembled more violently than ever, and the Bear almost lost his senses with fright and thought surely the Corpse Demon was coming this time. When, for the fourth time, the boy struck a tree, close to the Bear, the old fellow was thrown violently to the ground with the heaving of the earth and the bellowing of the sounds that issued forth. Picking himself up as fast as he could, never stopping to see whether it was a boy or a devil, he fled to the eastward as fast as his legs would carry him, and, as he heard the boy following him, he never stopped until he reached the Zuñi Mountains.
“There!” said the boy; “I’ll chase the old rogue no farther. He’s been living all these years on the mountain where more fruit and nuts and grass-seed grow than a thousand Bears could eat, and yet he’s never let so much as a single soul of the town of K’iákime gather a bit.”
Then the boy returned to his grandmother, and related to her what had taken place.
“Go,” said she, “and tell the people of K’iákime, from the top of yonder high rock, that those who wish to go out to gather grass-seed and datilas and piñon nuts need fear no longer.”