The brothers were scared; they thought: “He can’t be killed, but he has the power to kill us.” Tskel said: “Don’t [[328]]feel badly, there is one way to kill him. If you bury his mortar in the ground under water, he will die. I tried it one day.”
Now the five brothers started off for a long hunt and Pitoíois went with them. They said to Tskel: “If the old man gets hungry, you can come for deer’s meat; we will leave some hanging on trees around our camping places.”
The first day they killed a deer they hung the meat on trees and left the bones on the ground.
In one day old Wûlkûtska ate all that had been left in the house; then he made Tskel sleep and started to track his sons. He found the bones and he pounded and ate them. That night, when the brothers were making a camp in the bushes, they came upon a cave. In the morning they told Pitoíois to stay in the cave while they were hunting, and not to go out; that there were snakes around, and she mustn’t go to sleep, for if she did they would bite her.
When Tskel woke up and found that the old man was not in the house, he was frightened, and he ran out to find him. He followed his tracks till he came to where he was pounding and eating bones.
“Why did you come here?” asked Tskel. “Didn’t your sons tell you to stay at home?”
The old man didn’t listen to Tskel’s words; he kept on pounding. Tskel hurried along to overtake the brothers. When he came to their camp, he asked: “Where do you leave your wife while you are hunting?”
“We hide her.”
“You must be careful. Your father is tracking you; he means to kill her. I left him eating bones, but he will be here soon.”
Just then Tskel screamed out: “I see him now! There he is, peeping over that mountain.”