The old woman had been glaring vindictively at the white man, but now, discovered, she had a rather sheepish grin to hide under her robe.
"Chief," said Rain, turning away from her malicious little old mother, "my man and I have often been over the Wolf Trail in our dreams. Oh, but my dear man is so stupid. I cannot make him understand how spirit-animals and spirit-men speak all one language as we do—thought-flashings. He is so blind and deaf to natural things that animals are shy, and cannot flash their thoughts to him, no, not even his horse along the lead rope when we ride together. Yet we have ridden up there the dearest spirit-horses who died gallant deaths on earth. We have raced with the herds of spirit-buffalo on prairies gay with fairy flowers. We sat in my father's lodge, and Thunder Feather with us, while we smoked the everyday pipe, or used the medicine pipe for the great prayers. We worshiped together in the Medicine Lodge. We played with the spirit-children. Oh, but my man is so dull that he still fears Death!"
"My daughter," said Hiawatha, "only the most awful sorrow can awake your man until he is fully alive. Then will the animals converse with him as they do with us, the little children will teach him as they teach us, and he will see how our nature worship is part of a great faith. Words cannot teach, only experience.
"Now we must tell him about the race-death."
"I would," said Rain, "that all my people were past the race-death, safe in our Happy Hunting grounds from Windmaker's tempests, Coldmaker's blizzards, from the magicians of the Hunger Lodge, the peril of wild rivers, the hatreds, wounds, and pain, the pestilence, the wailing of the mourners."
"The lily," said Hiawatha, "has her roots in the dirt, but her white vesture is not soiled whose warp and weft are sunshine and clear rain, her home the winds invisible.
"So stands the Indian Spirit seeded on earth, but flowering in the heavens."
And after that there was silence.
Storm looked about him, and found that he was alone. Around him were trees like torches, gaunt, funereal, their feet in old gray snow. At the foot of one of these he crouched naked, famished, shivering, his feet bruised, his limbs benumbed and scarred with wounds which seemed to have been bleeding. Far down across the forest he saw the icy river, and beyond, thin threads of smoke went up from the lodges of the Kutenais camp. Cramped and in pain he stood, remembering that he must observe the rite of purification, and how he should put on the sacred dress of a warrior. Mother said that this must be completed at Fort Colville. What, then, was lacking?
So he set forward upon this adventure.