on a brown boulder that matched so perfectly with her watered coat that
if it had not been for the ruffling of the wind on her short fur and the
twitchings of her tail, the children might not have discovered her.
"Look," she said, stretching out one of her great pads toward the south,
where the trail ran thin and white across a puma-colored land, streaked
with black lava and purple shadow. Far at the other end it lifted in
red, wall-sided buttes where the homes of the Cliff People stuck like
honeycombs in the wind-scoured hollows.

"Now I recall a trail in that country," said Moke-icha, "that was older
than the oldest father's father of them could remember. Four times a
year the People of the Cliffs went down on it to the Sacred Water, and
came back with bags of salt on their shoulders."

Even as she spoke they could see the people coming out of the Cliff
dwellings and the priests going into the kivas preparing for
the journey.

That was how it was; when any animal spoke of the country he knew best,
that was what the children saw. And yet all the time there was the
beginning of the buffalo trail in front of them, and around them, drawn
there by that something of himself which every man puts into the work of
his hands, the listening tribesmen. One of these spoke now in answer to
Moke-icha.

"Also in my part of the country," he said, "long before there were Pale
Faces, there were trade trails and graded ways, and walled ways between
village and village. We traded for cherts as far south as Little River
in the Tenasas Mountains, and north to the Sky-Blue Water for copper
which was melted out of rocks, and there were workings at Flint Ridge