"'Nay, Brother,' said Howkawanda, 'but I also have been counted dead, and it is in my heart that this one shall serve us better living than dead.' He nursed the great white bird in his bosom and fed it with the last of their food and a little snow-water melted in his palm. In an hour, rested and strengthened, the bird rose again, beating a wide circle slowly and steadily upward, until, with one faint honk of farewell, it sailed slowly out of sight between the peaks, sure of its direction.
"'That way,' said Howkawanda, 'lies Dead Man's Journey.'
"When they came back over the same trail a year later, they were frightened to see what steeps and crevices they had covered. But for that first trip the snow-crust held firm while they made straight for the gap in the peaks through which the wild goose had disappeared. They traveled as long as the light lasted, though their hearts sobbed and shook with the thin air and the cold.
"The drifts were thinner, and the rocks came through with clusters of wind-slanted cedars. By nightfall snow began again, and they moved, touching, for they could not see an arm's length and dared not stop lest the snow cover them. And the hair along the back of Younger Brother began to prick.
"'Here I die, indeed,' said Howkawanda at last, for he suffered most because of his naked skin. He sank down in the soft snow at Younger Brother's shoulder.
"'Up, Master,' said Younger Brother, 'I hear something.'
"'It is the Storm Spirit singing my death song,' said Howkawanda. But the coyote took him by the neck of his deerskin shirt and dragged him a little.
"'Now,' he said, 'I smell something.'
"Presently they stumbled into brush and knew it for red cedar. Patches of it grew thick on the high ridges, matted close for cover. As the travelers crept under it they heard the rustle of shoulder against shoulder, the moving click of horns, and the bleat of yearlings for their mothers. They had stumbled in the dark on the bedding-place of a flock of Bighorn.
"'Now we shall also eat,' said Younger Brother, for he was quite empty.