"To-morrow at this hour swim back across the river, call the tribe together, and ask them to pray for you to the Sun, the Moon, and Morning Star.
"Go to the Council Lodge, and you shall use the big-turnip smoke to purify your body. The chief is to open the bundle of the medicine pipe, and after the ceremony the medicine man will dress you in these new clothes which the widows made of love, prayers, and the honor of the tribe to the glory of the Sun. It is full of spiritual power to guard you from evil, but your mother says that the dress is not completed until you reach Fort Colville."
II—COMMUNION
Naked and hungry, torn by the thorns, and bruised, his feet bleeding on the rough ground, Storm climbed to keep himself warm until he stood among the last trees. They were like torches, gaunt, funereal, their feet in the old gray snow, their heads among the stars waiting until the moon should rise and kindle them. Far down beneath, the howls of the timber wolves cleft the still deeps of night. Storm leaned against a tree facing the south, awed by the silence to the verge of terror. And then through the silence there came a voice more beautiful than he had ever heard on earth:
Spirit in the Sun,
I thank Thee for my training
In sorrow and adversity, in want and peril,
Which have brought me nearer to Thee;
For the happy adventures of my life,
The beauty of the earth,
The revelations of Thy mighty power,
And all the love which has enfolded me.
"Who prays?" cried Storm. "Who says the prayer?"
He looked about him, and found he was not alone, for Rain was on her knees close by, her mother, Thunder Feather, his mother, Catherine, the three of them busy kindling a little fire. The man whose voice he had heard stood just beyond them, a figure of radiant light and more than human stature, wearing a ceremonial robe of milk-white deerskin and a single eagle plume in his hair, the token of chiefship. Storm looked up very humbly at the Spirit whose face had so grave, so sweet a majesty.
A glance of the great chief's eyes commanded him to look at the scene surrounding them.
The trees had faded into mist. Now they were gone, and the snow lay unbroken, level, a headland from whose edges, near on either side, the walls went down into deep immensities of space. On the far side of this abyss, all round the east, the south, and the west, mountains were taking substance in slow revelation of walls inimitably deep, broken by five small glaciers. Precipice immeasurably high, scored here and there by cornices of clear green ice, shouldered the starlit snow fields, from whence there soared seven peaks of hewn and graven starlight.
As he watched, these mountains began to glow with an inner light, each of one clear color, the whole a spectrum enclosing the level hilltop. From where the three women knelt, a thin blue smoke ascended, as from an altar.