This story is about Lox. He called himself the joker, and he was very proud of his jokes; but nobody else could see anything in them to laugh at.
One day he came to a wigwam where two old Indians were taking a nap beside the fire. He picked out a burning stick, held it against their bare feet, and then ran out and hid behind the tent. The old men sprang up, and one of them shouted to the other:
“How dare you burn my feet?”
“How dare you burn my feet?” roared the other, and sprang at his throat.
When he heard them fighting Lox laughed out loud, and the old men ran out to catch the man who had tricked them. When they got round the tent they found nothing but a dead coon. They took off its skin, and put its body into the pot of soup that was boiling for dinner. As soon as they had sat down, out jumped Lox, kicking over the pot and putting out the fire with the soup. He jumped right into the coon’s skin and scurried away into the wood.
In the middle of the forest Lox came upon a camp where a party of women were sitting round a fire making pouches.
“Dear me,” said Lox, looking very kind. (He had put on his own skin by this time.) “That’s very slow work! Now, when I want to make a pouch I do it in two minutes, without sewing a stitch.”
“I should like to see you do it!” said one of the women.
“Very well,” said he. So he took a piece of skin, and a needle and twine, and a handful of beads, and stuffed them in among the burning sticks. In two minutes he stooped down again and pulled a handsome pouch out of the fire.
“Wonderful!” said the women; and they all stuffed their pieces of buckskin and handfuls of beads into the fire.