[X]
[THE MAKING OF A SHAMAN: A TELLING OF THE IROQUOIS TRAIL, BY THE ONONDAGA]
Down the Mound-Builder's graded way the children ran looking for the Onondaga. Like all the trail in the Museum Country it covered a vast tract of country in a very little while, so that it was no time at all before they came out among high, pine-covered swells, that broke along the watercourses into knuckly granite headlands. From one of these, steady puffs of smoke arose, and a moment later they could make out the figure of an Indian turning his head from side to side as he searched the surrounding country with the look of eagles. They knew him at once, by the Medicine bundle at his belt and the slanting Iroquois feather, for their friend the Onondaga.
"I was looking for you by the lake shore trail," he explained as Oliver and Dorcas Jane climbed up to him. "You must have come by the Musking-ham-Mahoning; it drops into the Trade Trail of the Iroquois yonder,"--he pointed south and east,--"the Great Trail, from the Mohican-ittuck to the House of Thunder." He meant the Hudson River and the Falls of Niagara. "Even at our village, which was at the head of the lake here, we could hear the Young Thunders, shouting from behind the falls," he told them.
A crooked lake lay below them like a splinter of broken glass between the headlands. From the far end of it the children could see smoke rising. "We used to signal our village from here when we went on the war-trail," said the Onondaga; "we would cut our mark on a tree as we went out, and as we came back we added the war count. I was looking for an old score of mine to-day."
"Had it anything to do with the Mound-Builders?" Dorcas wished to know. "He said you knew the end of that story."
The Onondaga shook his head.
"That was a hundred years before my time, and is a Telling of the Lenni-Lenape. In the Red Score it is written, the Red Score of the Lenni-Lenape. When my home was in the village there, the Five Nations held all the country between the lakes and the Mohican-ittuck. But there were many small friendly tribes along the borders, Algonquian mostly."