“But I want to play,” insisted the child.
Kak was silent.
“Brother, please be nice and play,” the little girl coaxed, looking at him through her lashes, dropping her voice to a small murmur.
She stood before him, winsome and pathetic, with her long hair hanging in two braids over her shoulders and her hands clasped behind her back. But the boy was gazing ruefully at his arrow. Her blow had broken it.
“Get out,” he answered. “Can’t I ever have any peace? Leave me alone!”
Noashak, who happened to be in one of her rare good moods and expected everybody else to be good too, looked for a second as if she were going to cry; then she turned swiftly.
“I will play with the hares and marmots,” she said, “for I have no brother and the children are all away.”
With that she began to run. Her little brown legs twinkled over the ground toward the thickest woods where spruce held out protecting arms. Her clothes were of dappled fawnskin and once among the lichened rocks and checkered shadows she was as completely hidden as a fawn.
Kak replaced the broken part and trained his eye down the spliced shaft. His conscience troubled him. “You might have played a game with your little sister,” something seemed to say; and reason answered: “But how is a chap ever to get a day’s work done?” He rubbed his sore chin gingerly and measured the arrow again. Quite right. Yet he did not hold it up for his mother’s approval as was his wont. Guninana had seen that roughness; had looked at him reproachfully. The boy felt unhappy and ashamed. He got up and walked away to the working place, where all the wood he and his father had hewed stood drying. Taptuna was there putting the finishing touches to his new sled. Mere sight of that sleigh was enough to raise anybody’s spirits.
“A beaut’!” Kak cried. “How Sapsuk and Pikalu will make it flash along.”