Her sister was there. The younger asked: “Did you pass anybody?”
“No.”
“Then your eyes are poor, for I saw a nice-looking young man.”
The elder sister took her cap and was going to drink. Just then Wámanik stood up in the form of a snake. She screamed, dropped her cap, and ran off, when she came to where her mother was digging, she was so scared that her eyes were sticking out, and she couldn’t speak. [[199]]
Her mother asked: “Why don’t you talk?”
After a while she said: “There is a big snake in the spring.”
“Well, well,” said her mother, “what kind of a man do you want? You can’t live single all your life.”
When the elder sister ran away, Wámanik turned to a nice-looking man. He came up to the younger girl and said: “I can be a great many different things. I am a spirit of this earth; I have seen you often, but I didn’t want to show myself to your sister; I wanted to frighten her. I don’t like her as well as I do you. I have heard you talk, and I want you for a wife, for I like you. I can turn to a snake, but I am a man, and I have lots of nice clothes.” Then he turned to a snake again, for he saw the old woman and her daughter coming.
On the way home the younger girl said to her mother: “Make a bed for us and put on our panther-skin blankets.”
Wámanik was under the ground just where the girls were sitting. In the night when they woke up, they felt somebody between them. At daylight Wámanik went down in the ground right where the bed was. Every night after that the girls changed. If a person saw them one day they didn’t know them the next. Wámanik came each night. In the daytime he was under the ground near where they were digging roots.