children saw the great elk trotting leisurely with his cows behind him,
flattening his antlers over his back out of the way of the low-branching
maples. The switching of the brush against the elk's dun sides startled
the little black bear, who was still riffling his bee tree. The children
watched him rise inquiringly to his haunches before he scrambled down
the trail out of sight.

"Lots of those fellows about in my day," said the Mound-Builder. "We
used to go for them in the fall when they grew fat on the dropping nuts
and acorns. Elk, too. I remember a ten-pronged buck that I shot one
winter on the Elk's-Eye River..."

"The Muskingum!" exclaimed an Iroquois, who had listened in silence to
the puma's story. "Did you call it that too? Elk's-Eye! Clear brown and
smooth-flowing. That's the Scioto Trail, isn't it?" he asked of the
Mound-Builder.

"You could call it that. There was a cut-off at Beaver Dam to Flint
Ridge and the crossing of the Muskingum, and another that led to the
mouth of the Kanawha where it meets the River of White-Flashing."

"He means the Ohio," explained the Iroquois to the children. "At flood
the whole surface of the river would run to white riffles like the flash
of a water-bird's wings. But the French called it La Belle Riviere. I'm
an Onondaga myself," he added, "and in my time the Five Nations held all
the territory, after we had driven out the Talle-gewi, between the Lakes
and the O-hey-yo." He stretched the word out, giving it a little
different turn. "Indians' names talk little," he laughed, "but they
say much."