The next morning, after the brothers had started off to hunt, and the sisters had gone to swim in the river, the father and mother took their youngest son out of the basket to bathe him and give him roots to eat.
He said: “My sister uncovers my basket and talks to me. I want you to hide me in some other place.”
Out in the ocean there was a little island as big as a house; the eldest brother made a place there to keep his blue-haired brother. While he was making the place nice, he pretended to be off hunting; when it was finished, he carried his brother there and hid him under the ground. One day, when he took roots to the island, his little sister went with him to watch that her older sister didn’t follow them. They went home after dark, for they didn’t want their sister to see which way they came.
The elder sister spent all of her time out of doors, swimming and gathering wood. The third time the brother went to the island, he left his little sister there to take care of her brother and keep the elder sister away.
For five days the sister hunted for her brother. She hunted everywhere,—over the mountains, under the rocks, and out on the flats. Then she said: “I wonder where my little sister has gone. If I find her, maybe I will find my brother, too.”
When she asked her mother, the old woman said: “Your sister is in the south, with your brother.”
“Why did you stop bathing my brother and why have you carried him away?” asked the girl. “Some day I will kill you all.”
When she had hunted everywhere else, she went to the island [[270]]and there she found tracks, then she knew that her brother and sister were somewhere on the island. She pulled up the tula grass and looked under each blade of it, but she couldn’t find them.
When the little girl saw her sister coming straight toward the island, she took a spear of tula grass and scraped it out with her finger nail, made it like a canoe; then she put her brother in it and they went under the water, went home.
When the elder sister couldn’t find them, she knew that they had seen her and had gone away. That made her mad. She said: “We will see who is the most powerful!” When she got back to dry land, she lay down, and rolled over and over on the sand, and cried “Wah-ha-ha! Wah-ha-ha!” Then she sat up on her knees and began to travel fast; all the time calling out “Wah-ha-ha.” Right where she had rolled and along the trail she traveled, fire roared and blazed up to the sky. She went around the village where her father and mother lived and each minute she called: “Wah-ha-ha! Wah-ha-ha!”