There is another roll of drums, and then silence.
The circling blankets and plumes become motionless. The chief of the Cascades is coming, and with him is Benjamin and his young bride, and Gretchen.
The royal party mount the platform, and in honor of the event the torch-dance begins. A single torch flashes upon the air; another is lighted from it, another and another. A hundred are lighted—a thousand. They begin to dance and to whirl; the plateau is a dazzling scene of circling fire. Gretchen recalled the old fêtes amid the vineyards of the Rhine in her childhood.
Hither and thither the circles move—round and round. There is poetry in this fire-motion; and the great army of fire-dancers become excited under it, and prepared for the frenzy of the Spirit-dance that is to follow.
The torches go out. The moon turns the smoke into wannish clouds of white and yellow, which slowly rise, break, and disappear.
There is another roll of drums. Wild cries are heard in the forests. The "biters" are beginning their hunt.
Who are the biters? They are Indians in hides of bears and wolves, who run on their hands and feet, uttering terrible cries, and are followed by women, who, to make the scene more fearful, pretend to hold them back, and restrain them from violence. The Spirit-dance is held to be a sacred frenzy, and before it begins the biters are charged to hunt the woods for any who have not joined the army of dancers, and, if such are found, to bite them and tear their flesh with their teeth. They also guard the dance like sentinels, and fly at one who attempts to leave it before it is done.
The frenzied shrieks of these human animals, and of the women who follow them, produce a wonderful nervous effect upon the listening multitudes. All feel that they are about to enter into the ecstatic spiritual condition of departed souls, and are to be joined by the shades of the dead heroes and warriors of tradition and story.
Each dancer has a masque. It may be an owl's head with mother-of-pearl eyes, or a wooden pelican's beak, or a wolf's head. It may be a wooden animal's face, which can be pulled apart by a string, and reveal under it an effigy of a human face, the first masque changing into great ears. The museum at Ottawa, Canada, contains a great number of such masques, and some missionaries in the Northwest make curious collections of them.
The whirling begins. Everywhere are whirling circles—round and round they go. The sight of it all would make a spectator dizzy. Cries arise, each more and more fearful; the whole multitude are at last shrieking with dizzy heads and wildly beating pulses. The cries become deafening; an almost superhuman frenzy passes over all; they seem to be no longer mortal—the armies of the dead are believed to be about them; they think that they are reveling in the joys of the heroes' paradise. One by one they drop down, until the whole assembly is exhausted.