"It was like a bright, strange bird. It was like a beautiful flower that bursts suddenly into bloom and life from a husk of bray seed. It was like magic!—like the eye of a god!—like the secret of life! At least so it seemed to Porcupine Killer. Nothing before, except the feelings of love and courage, had ever awakened so much joy in him.
"'What is it? Give it to me,' he cried; but his spirit had no voice, and the man on the sand did not so much as turn his head. He was still busy with the magic thing that had so suddenly come to his hand. Now he ceased the movement of the bow and let it fall on the sand, where it lay unheeded, with a faint mist arising from the cord of twisted vine. He fed the yellow, living thing with leaves of the dry grass, and it grew and leapt under his hand. Suddenly he turned to the little bunch of dry grass at his elbow—and, quick as thought, every fiber of it had blossomed to red and yellow. Now, from the heap of twigs and sticks, he fed that wonderful, leaping thing that had flashed into life but a few moments before, no larger than a baby's finger, and that now covered a space on the sand as wide and long as a snow-shoe track."
"What was it?" asked little Flying Plover, in an awed whisper.
"It was fire—fire like that," replied the old medicine-woman, pointing at the glowing coals and leaping flames within the circle of stones in the center of the floor. For a moment the child looked puzzled, and glanced at his grandmother to see if she were laughing at him. Then he nodded his head.
"Yes, the fire is alive," he said; "but why did the queer, black man rub the bow across the flat piece of wood?"
"There were no matches in those days such as the traders sell now," replied the old woman. "And fire could not be struck out of the flint as it was when I was young, because there was no steel with which to strike the flint. All these things that I am telling you happened a very long time ago, little son of a chief."
Again Flying Plover nodded his head.
"And then what did the queer man on the sand do when his fire was burning so well?" he asked.
"I do not know what he did," replied Squat-by-the-fire, "for just when the sticks were crackling and the flames leaping high as the flames of our own fire, the spirit of Porcupine Killer flew back to his body and poor Porcupine Killer opened his eyes and found himself lying on the bed of leaves in his dark, narrow cave. And the hungry-pain gnawed him again, and he heard his wife crying beside him as she rocked the little baby in her arms. But there was a lightness in his heart that had not been there when he fell asleep, and his dream was as clear as a picture in his mind. He got up quickly from his bed of leaves and dry moss, and crawled to the back of the cave where some of his bows and spears were stored, along with several pieces of seasoned wood for the making of arrows. Without telling the woman a word of his wonderful dream, he broke one of his bows in two pieces. But the string of caribou sinew was not what he wanted. He felt about in the dark, and soon found some strands of tough hemlock root which he had once used for snares. Finding three strands of a length, he plated them together into one thick, tough cord—and with this he strung a piece of the broken bow.
"'What are you doing?' asked his wife.