Ó-ma-ta Há-wi-mo!”[33]
sang they as they ran headlong toward the Two, and then they began shouting:
“Tread them both into the ground! Smite them both! Fan them out! Ho-o! Ha-a! Há-wi-mo-o ó-ma-ta!”
[33] This, like so many of the folk-tale songs, can only be translated etymologically or by extended paraphrasing. Such songs are always jargonistic, either archaic, imitative, or adapted from other languages of tribes who possibly supplied incidents to the myths themselves; but they are, like the latter, strictly harmonized with the native forms of expression and phases of belief. [Back]
But the Twain laughed and quickly drew their arrows and loosed them amongst the crowd. P’it! tsok! sang the arrows through and through the people, but never a one fell.
“Why, how now is this?” cried the elder brother.
“We’ll club them, then!” said Mátsailéma, and he whiffed out his war-club and sprang to meet the foremost whom he pummelled well and sorely over the head and shoulders. Yet the man was only confused (he was too soft and unstable to be hurt); but another, rushing in at one side, was hit by one of the shield-feathers and fell to the ground like smoke driven down under a hawk’s wing.
“Hold, brother, I have it! Hold!” cried Áhaiyúta. Then he snatched up a bunch of dry plume-grass and leaped forward. Swish! Two ways he swept the faces and breasts of the pursuers. Lo! right and left they fell like bees in a rain-storm, and quickly sued for mercy, screeching and running at the mere sight of the grass-straws.
“You fools!” cried the brothers. “Why, then, did ye set upon us? We came for to help you and were merely looking ahead as becomes strangers in strange places, when, lo! you come running out like a mess of mad flies with your ‘Ha-a sús-ki ó-ma-ta!’ Call us coyote-sneaks, do you? But there! Rest fearless! We hunger; give us to eat.”
So they led the Twain into the court within the town and quickly brought steaming food for them.