[Original]

XXI. THE BIRD LOVER

IN a region of country where the forest and the prairie strove which should be the most beautiful—the open plain with its free sunshine and winds and flowers, or the close wood with its delicious twilight walks and green hollows—there lived a wicked manito in the disguise of an old Indian.

Although the country furnished an abundance of game and whatever else a good heart could wish for, it was the study of this wicked genius to destroy such people as fell into his hands. He made use of all his arts to decoy men into his power for the purpose of killing them. The country had been once thickly peopled, but this Mudjee Monedo had so thinned it by his cruel practices that he now lived almost solitary in the wilderness.

The secret of his success lay in his great speed. He had the power to assume the shape of any four-footed creature, and it was his custom to challenge to a race all those he sought to destroy. He had a beaten path on which he ran, leading around a large lake, and he always ran around this circle so that the starting and the winning-post was the same. Whoever failed, as every one had, yielded up his life at this post; and although he ran every day, no man was ever known to beat this evil genius; for whenever he was pressed hard, he changed himself into a fox, wolf, deer, or other swift-footed animal, and was thus able to leave his competitor behind.

The whole country was in dread of this same Mudjee Monedo, and yet the young men were constantly running with him; for if they refused, he called them cowards, which was a reproach they could not bear. They would rather die than be called cowards.