"I will not," Red Crane answered. "This is going to be a lesson to you. Remember this—you, too, Lone Bull: those who gamble are always poor. Also, gamblers are not good men: they use up so much time playing games that they seldom hunt, and their women and children have not enough meat to eat. Neither are they of any account in war. If all our men gambled, the enemy would soon kill us all off."
"But, grandfather, I have no top now," said Sinopah, doing his best not to cry any more, "and see how clear and hard the ice is. I want to spin a top on it."
"Well, if you are very good, and will promise never to gamble again, I will begin making you another top to-morrow," said the old man. "Now, you will all go with me after some red willow. I want the bark of it to mix with my tobacco. There is a fine patch of it growing close to the shore above here."
Never was there clearer ice than that on the river this morning. It was as clear as a glass window pane. Everything in the water under it could be seen plainly, the rocks, gravel, and sand of the bottom, and the trout lying almost still in the deep places.
While they stood looking down at a very large trout, suddenly a long, slender, dark brown animal with big, webbed hind feet, came swimming down into the deep hole. The trout saw it and turned and swam like a flash toward the branches of a sunken tree. The animal was a faster swimmer; it went so fast after the trout that it was just a brown streak in the water, and it caught the fish, and, holding it crosswise in its mouth, started to swim back upstream.
"Ha! Am-on-is" (otter), "killer of fish," old Red Crane cried, and stamped on the ice.
That frightened the otter; it let go of the bleeding and dying trout and swam away downstream.
"O-kye-hai! You children down there," Red Crane shouted, "spread out and stamp on the ice. Scare back an otter swimming toward you."
There must have been all of a hundred children in the top-spinning crowd. The old man had to shout two or three times to make them understand, and then they all spread out and stamped the ice with their feet, and pounded it with their tops and whips, making altogether a terrible noise.