"The moose had begun to travel down the mountain and like a good brother he came back for me. Nukéwis lifted me up and bound me to his antlers, holding me from the other side, but I was too weak to notice.
"We must have traveled that way for hours through the storm until we reached the tall woods below the limit of the snow. When I came to myself, I was lying on a bed of fern in a bright morning and Nukéwis was cooking quail which she had snared with a slip noose made of her hair. I ate--I could eat now that I had had my Vision--and grew strong. All the upper mountain was white like a tent of deerskin, but where we were there was only thin ice on the edges of the streams.
"We stayed there for one moon. I wished to get my strength back, and besides, we wished to get married, Nukéwis and I."
"But how could you, without any party?" Dorcas wished to know. She had never seen anybody get married, but she knew it was always spoken of as a Wedding Party.
"We had the party four months later when we got back to my own village," explained the Onondaga. "For that time I built a hut, and when I had led her across the door, as our custom was, I scattered seeds upon her--seeds of the pine tree. Then we sat in our places on either side the fire, and she made me cake of acorn meal, and we made a vow as we ate it that we would love one another always.
"We were very happy. I hunted and fished, and the old moose fed in our meadow. Nukéwis used to gather armfuls of grass for him. When we went back to my wife's village he trotted along in the trail behind us like a dog. Nukéwis wished to go back after her father's Medicine bag, and being a woman she did not wish to go to my mother without her dower. There were many handsome skins and baskets in her father's hut which had been given to him when he was Medicine Man. She felt sure Waba-mooin would not have touched them. And as for me, I was young enough to want Waba-mooin to see that I was also a Shaman.
"We stole into Nukéwis's hut in the dark, and when it was morning a light snow was over the ground to cover our tracks, and there was our smoke going up and the great moose standing at our door chewing his cud and over the door the Medicine bag of Nukéwis's father. How the neighbors were astonished! They ran for Waba-mooin, and when I saw him coming in all his Shaman's finery, I put on the old Medicine Man's shirt and his pipe and went out to smoke with him as one Shaman with another."
The Onondaga laughed to himself, remembering. "It was funny to see him try to go through with it, but there was nothing else for him to do. I ought to have punished him a little for what he did to Nukéwis, but my heart was too full of happiness and my Mystery. And perhaps it was punishment enough to have me staying there in the village with all the folk bringing me presents and neglecting Waba-mooin. I think he was glad when we set out for my own village in the Moon of the Sap Running.
"I knew my mother would be waiting for me, and besides, I wished my son to be born an Onondaga."
"And what became of the old moose?"