big lodge and laid upon a wide, low couch, covered with soft skins, the
fur of a grizzly which had fallen to her man's rifle. "Hai-yai, I wish
it would last for ever--so sweet!" she added, smoothing the fur
lingeringly, and showing her teeth in a smile.

"There will come a great storm, Mitiahwe. See, the birds go south so
soon," responded a deep voice from a corner by the doorway.

The young Indian wife turned quickly, and, in a defiant fantastic mood
--or was it the inward cry against an impending fate, the tragic future
of those who will not see, because to see is to suffer?--she made some
quaint, odd motions of the body which belonged to a mysterious dance of
her tribe, and, with flashing eyes, challenged the comely old woman
seated on a pile of deer-skins.

"It is morning, and the day will last for ever," she said nonchalantly,
but her eyes suddenly took on a faraway look, half apprehensive, half
wondering. The birds were indeed going south very soon, yet had there
ever been so exquisite an autumn as this, had her man ever had so
wonderful a trade--her man with the brown hair, blue eyes, and fair,
strong face?

"The birds go south, but the hunters and buffalo still go north,"
Mitiahwe urged searchingly, looking hard at her mother--Oanita, the Swift
Wing.

"My dream said that the winter will be dark and lonely, that the ice will
be thick, the snow deep, and that many hearts will be sick because of the
black days and the hunger that sickens the heart," answered Swift Wing.