Wongo put his eye to the hole
His heart beating wildly with excitement, he reached the little hole in the wall of the hogan and cautiously put his eye to it. What a sight met his startled gaze! There were several Navaho men in the house, and two or three little men—Kaw had called them boys. The first thing that caught Wongo’s wondering attention was the fire. There it was, right in the center of the man-house. It was alive, and was eating sticks and bits of bark that popped and cracked as they died! And as it ate it seemed to leave a white dust that danced up into the light, when the men prodded the fire with a stick. Heat seemed to come from it, like the heat from the sun. Wongo had never seen anything like it before. On the floor around the fire sat the Indians and the voice of one of the boy-men drew Wongo’s attention away from the fire. One old man was making something with straight sticks and the boy-man asked, “Why must the feathers be put on the end of the arrows, father?”
“It is the tail feathers of the bird that makes the bird fly straight, and it is the feathers of the arrow’s tail that makes it go straight when it leaves the bow string,” replied the old man.
“Why do you make long little grooves on the sides of the arrow, father?” asked the boy-man.
“When the arrow goes into the deer the grooves let the blood come out at the sides. If no grooves are there, the arrow fills the wound, and the deer may run far and get away before he is dead.”
Wongo drank in this information and put it into the back of his thoughts for future use. Then his eye wandered around the circle of men, some holding long sticks in their lips, from which came little blue clouds like the larger clouds from the fire. This was confusing, and he could not understand it. Then his gaze fell suddenly on a man unlike any he had ever seen before. He sat back on the farther side of the fire against the wall of the man-house. His skin was white, and the lower part of his face had long hair on it, like the hair on the throat of the timber wolf in winter, only the man-hair was black.
Just back of the man with the white skin was a long, shining stick, standing against the wall. Suddenly the thought came to Wongo that the white-skinned man was the “squaw-man” and the shining stick of strange shape was the gun thing that could shoot to kill a bear. A little shiver of fear crept over him, when the silence was broken again by the boy-man, who asked, “Would the arrow from a strong bow kill a bear, father?”
“We do not send the arrow at the bear witch,” said the man. “It would not kill, but would anger the witch to great madness, and trouble—big trouble of much sickness—would come upon us all.”
Then came the strange voice of the squaw-man, and all of the others in the hogan listened closely as he spoke.
“Do my red brothers go with me to get the live bear when the sun is up to-morrow?” he asked. No one spoke for some time, and then an old man near the fire replied: