“Iagoo let his canoe drift like a leaf as he fished. It drifted near the shore of the river, then Iagoo stepped out on the shore. It sank under his feet. As the water came over where he stepped, he saw that he had not stepped on land. He had stepped on a thick lily leaf.
“Iagoo jumped back into his canoe. He broke the stem of the lily leaf with his fishing spear and put the great leaf in his canoe. It covered him and the canoe. He dried the leaf and rolled it in a pack. He went back to the far north when he had fished all he wanted to, and he gave the leaf to his squaw. She was glad. It [[86]]was like a wide buffalo skin; she made dresses for herself and her daughters out of it. No other squaws had such fine dresses.”
White Deer smiled, and the little girls laughed. They knew the pond-lily leaves were small in the lakes; they could not be so wide in a river.
“It is a story for squaws,” said the oldest boy.
“We will go to sleep,” said Lame Buffalo, his father.
The next night Lame Buffalo told this story of Iagoo for the boys:
“A white man gave Iagoo a gun, so my grandfather said. He could shoot better than any white man.
“Iagoo went hunting. It was the time for ducks. He went in his canoe, and he hid in the rice by the ducks. The ducks flew up and made the sun dark. He lay on his back and shot straight into the flock of ducks. A swan fell dead into his canoe. Its head was shot off; the ducks fell around his canoe like hail in a hailstorm; the water was black with the ducks he shot. He piled them up like a great teepee on the shore. He shot them all with one gunshot.
“The shot from his gun fell back into the lake; it struck two loons and killed them. The shot fell through the loons and killed a muskalonge; this is the great fish that lives in the lakes. No one else ever fired such a shot as did Iagoo. He told this to my grandfather.” [[87]]