He continued to eat in silence, scraping away at his hot soupaan with a pewter spoon. After he had licked both spoon and pannikin as clean as a cat licks a saucer, he pulled a piece of jerked deer meat in two and gravely chewed the morsel, his small, brilliant eyes ever roving from the water to the mainland.
Presently, without looking at me, he said quietly:
"When I was only a poor hunter of the Montagnais, I said to myself, 'I am a man, yet hardly one.'[23] I learned that a Saguenay was a real man when my brother told me.
"My brother cleared my eyes and wiped away the ancient mist of tears. I looked; and lo! I found that I was a real man. I was made like other men and not like a beast to be kicked at and stoned and driven with sticks flung at me in the forest."
"The Yellow Leaf is a warrior," I said. "The Oneida Anowara[24] bear witness to scalps taken in battle by the Yellow Leaf. Tahioni, the Wolf, took no more."
"Ni-ha-ron-ta-kowa,"[25] said the Saguenay proudly, "onkwe honwe![26] Yet it was my white brother who cleared my eyes of mist. Therefore, let him give me a new name—a warrior's name—meaning that my vision is now clear."
"Very well," said I, "your war name shall be Sak-yen-haton!"[27]—which was as good Iroquois as I could pronounce, and good enough for the Montagnais to comprehend, it seemed, for a gleam shot from his eyes, and I heard him say to himself in a low voice: "Haiah-ya! I am a real warrior now!... Onenh! at last!"
A shot came from the water; he looked around contemptuously and smiled.
"My elder brother," said he, "shall we two strip and set our knives between our teeth, and swim out to scalp those muskrats yonder?"
"And if they fire at us in the water?" said I, amused at his mad courage, who had once been "hardly a man."