GREAT good luck once happened to a young woman who was living all alone in the woods with nobody near her but her little dog; for she found fresh meat every morning at her door. She was much surprised and very curious to know who it was that supplied her. So she watched one morning, just as the sun had risen, and saw a handsome young man gliding away into the forest. Having seen her, he became her husband, and they had a son.
One evening not long after this, he did not return as usual from hunting. She waited till late at night, but he came not at all.
The next day she swung her child to sleep in its cradle, and then said to her dog, "Take care of your brother while I am gone, and when he cries, halloo for me."
The cradle was made of the finest wampum, and all its bandages and ornaments were of the same precious stuff.
After a short time, the woman heard the cry of the dog, and running home as fast as she could, she found her child gone, and the dog too. On looking around, she saw scattered upon the ground pieces of the wampum of her child's cradle, and she knew that the dog had been faithful and had striven his best to save the babe from being carried off.
Now the thief was an old woman from a distant country, called Mukakee Mindemoea, or the Toad-Woman. The mother hurried off at full speed in pursuit of her. As she flew along, she came from time to time to lodges inhabited by old women, who told her at what time the child-thief had passed; they also gave her shoes that she might follow on. A number of these old women seemed to be prophetesses, and knew what was to come long beforehand. Each of them would say to her that when she had arrived at the next lodge, she must set the toes of the moccasins they had given her pointing homeward, and that they would then return of themselves. The young woman was very careful to send back in this manner all the shoes she borrowed.
She thus followed in the pursuit, from valley to valley, and stream to stream, for many months and years, and at length came to the lodge of the last of the friendly old grandmothers, as they were called, who gave her final instructions how to proceed. She told the mother that she was near the place where her son was to be found; and she directed her to build a lodge of cedar-boughs hard by the old Toad-Woman's lodge, and to make a little bark dish, and to fill it with the juice of the wild grape.
"Then," she said, "your first child (meaning the dog) will come and find you out."
These directions the young woman followed just as they had been given to her, and in a short time she heard her son, now grown up, going out to hunt. The dog was following and she called out to him, "Pee-waubik—Spirit-Iron—Twee! Twee!"
The dog came into the lodge, and she set before him the dish of grape-juice.