"Two summers."
"How about you? Wouldn't you like to see the world again?"
Jean Bateese shook his head. "I am old," he said. "I have seen everything. I have travelled as far as the Landing. I have seen too much white man." Here, feeling that he had been impolite, he hastened to add deprecatingly: "White man good for white man. White man moch bad for red man. Nahnya say so. She is not lak other women. She is more wise than a man."
Ralph had the feeling that he was listening to wisdom from its source.
Jean Bateese waved his hand over the lovely scene before them, and his old eyes grew soft. "This our good hunting-ground," he said. "My boys good hunters. Him get good wife. Him have many good, fat babies. Him live same lak red man live long tam ago. Him forget white man. It is best."
As Ralph listened, the white man's world of artifice and oppression, the world of teeming, disease-ridden cities, the world of place-seeking and money-grubbing seemed like a nightmare to him. He felt as if he were being shown a glimpse of the essential truths of our being. As St. Jean had said in his own way, Nature was best.
Charley's wife, the blooming young Ahahweh, served him his dinner in an agony of bashfulness. The meal consisted of a stew of goat's flesh and rice. Ralph found it good.
"Rice?" he said questioningly.
"Wild rice," said Jean Bateese. "Him grow around the lake more than we can eat. We eat nothing from the white man's store only tea. The tea is near gone. I will miss it," he said with a sigh. "But our fat'ers not drink tea," he added stoutly.
Before Ralph was through eating, the two boys came into camp bearing his patient on the litter. Examining her, he found that she did not appear to have taken any hurt from her journey. Charley, St. Jean Bateese explained, had gone back through the cave to fetch the rest of their belongings from the camp in the woods.