wild apples or a basket of acorns, and I would set him on my neck so he
could scratch between my ears and tell me all his troubles. His father,
he said, had been a strong man who put himself at the head of the five
chiefs of the tribe and persuaded them to leave off fighting one another
and band together against the enemy tribes. Opata, the man who had
wished to kill me, was the man likeliest to be made High Chief in his
father's place.

"'And then my bad days will begin,' said Taku-Wakin, 'for he hates me
for my father's sake, and also a little for yours, Old Two-Tails, and he
will persuade the Council to give my mother to another man and I shall
be made subject to him. Worse,' he said,--'the Great Plan of my father
will come to nothing.'

"He was always talking about this Great Plan and fretting over it, but I
was too new to the customs of men to ask what he meant by it.

"'If I had but a Sign,' he said, 'then they would give me my father's
place in the Council ... but I am too little, and I have not yet killed
anything worth mentioning.'

"So he would sit on my neck and drum with his heels while he thought,
and there did not seem to be anything I could do about it. By this time
my knee was quite well. I had eaten all the brush in the ravine and was
beginning to be lonely. Taku wasn't able to visit me so often, for he
had his mother and young brothers to kill for.

"So one night when the moon came walking red on the trail of the day,
far down by Two Rivers I heard some of my friends trumpeting; therefore
I pulled down young trees along the sides of the ravine, with great