Maidwa ran home, and bringing all the arrows in the lodge, shot them away. He then stood with his bow dropped at his side, lost in wonder, gazing at the beautiful bird.
While standing thus, with a heart beating more and more eagerly every moment for the possession of this fair swan, Maidwa remembered the saying of his elder brother, that in their dead father's medicine-sack were three magic arrows; but his brother had not told Maidwa that their father, on his death-bed, had especially bequeathed the arrows to his youngest son, Maidwa, from whom they had been wrongfully kept. The thought of the magic arrows put heart in Maidwa, and he hastened with all speed to procure them.
At any other time he would have shrunk from opening his father's medicine-sack, but something prompted him to believe that there was no wrong in it now, and snatching the arrows forth, he ran back, not staying to restore the other contents to the sack but leaving them scattered, here and there, about the lodge.
He feared that the swan must by this time have taken wing; but as he emerged from the wood, he found to his great delight the air as rosy as ever, and there sat the glorious Red Swan in her own serene and beautiful way.
With trembling hand he shot the first of his magic shafts; it grazed a wing. The second came closer, and cut away a few of the bright red feathers, which fluttered and fell like flakes of fire in the water. The third, which he carefully aimed and drew home upon the string with all his force, made the lucky hit, and passed through the neck of the bird a little above the breast.
[Original]
"She is mine," cried Maidwa, but to his great surprise, instead of drooping its neck and drifting to the shore, the Red Swan flapped its wings, rose slowly, and flew off with a majestic motion toward the falling sun.
Maidwa, that he might meet his brothers with a good face, rescued two of the magic arrows from the water. And although the third was borne off, he had a hope yet to recover that one, too, and to be master of the swan. He was noted for his speed; for he would shoot an arrow and then run so fast that the arrow always fell behind him. He now set off at his best speed of foot.