Kéis went, but he didn’t do as his brother told him. He went straight to the snares the Gletcówas brothers had set. In one of the snares was a large fat deer. Kéis tried to untie the knot in the rope around its neck; he couldn’t do it; so he pulled at it till he broke out all but two of his teeth.
“We will go to the snares, and see if we have caught anything,” said the eldest of the Gletcówas brothers.
“I will stay and dry meat,” said the youngest. There was a great deal of meat hanging on trees near the house.
When the two brothers came to where their snares were, they saw a man. “Who are you?” asked one of them.
Kéis didn’t answer, but as soon as they untied the deer he sprang upon it and cried: “This is mine!”
“No, it is ours!” said the eldest brother, “but if you will come with us, we will give you some of the meat. We can’t cut the deer up here; it would spoil our snares.”
Kéis didn’t listen to them; he went off. His mouth was bleeding, and he was mad. When he got home, he sat down and began to make poison—fever and black vomit and terrible things.
“What is the matter?” asked Snoútiss. “What makes your mouth bleed? Why are you working so hard over that bad stuff? It is wrong to make that. It may get out of our house and spread everywhere; then the people to come will have these terrible things and die.”
“Those brothers in the northwest took my deer from me,—a large, fat one,” said Kéis, and he kept on making the medicine.
“You must have gone to their snares,” said the boy. “They couldn’t cut the deer up there in the woods.”