“Then if death should find him——”
“What death?” returned her father, testily. “The medicine-men have been questioned in this matter. You are but a squaw, my child, and cannot see the truth of these things.”
“True, I am but a squaw,” returned Hawk-in-the-Tree, modestly. “But will not my father tell me the words of the medicine-men?”
So the chief told her what the wise ones of the nation had said about Walking Moose. He did not know that, as usual, their wise words were nothing more than a clever fiction to mystify the warriors and retain the awe of the laity for the dark arts. To soothe the injured pride of the chiefs they had said that the prowess of Walking Moose was due to magic; that he could not be killed in battle, or by the spilling of blood, or by fire; that starvation only could kill him, and that within bowshot of his own village. It was a clever invention. No wonder the chiefs and warriors were puzzled and impressed.
“To be starved within bowshot of his own village?” repeated Hawk-in-the-Tree, reflectively. “Then he must first be caught and bound—then hidden in a place where his warriors cannot find him.”
“It is so,” replied the chief.
Hawk-in-the-Tree drew him into the lodge. The scornful words and heedless glance of the Maliseet were hot and clear in her memory. She talked to her father for a long time. He smiled sneeringly at first, but after a while he began to nod his head.
II
Walking Moose did not devote all his time in the summer months to the catching and smoking of salmon and trout. He wandered about the country, in seeming idleness, but in reality his brain was busy with ambitious plans. And always his eyes were open and his ears alert. He did not expect another attack from the Mohawks before the time of the hunter’s moon, but he continued to place his outposts far and near, and to visit them at unexpected moments. Though his village had doubled in size within the year, and leapt into fame, he was not satisfied. He wanted to drive the Mohawks far to the westward and break them so that they would never again venture into the fringes of the Maliseet country, and he dreamed of the day when all the scattered clans and villages of the Maliseets would name him for their head chief.
One morning in July he followed the edge of Woolastook’s rocky valley for a distance of about five miles above the village, then clambered down the bank and crossed the brawling stream—for at this point old Woolastook, the father of Maliseet rivers, was no more than a lively brook. Beneath the farther bank was a flat rock and an amber pool. He laid aside his shield and bow, and reclined on the rock to dream his ambitious dreams. So he lay for an hour, and the sunlight slanted in upon him and gilded his dreams.