at his master, and none of them cared where the Rains were.

"But when no rain fell at all, the camp was moved far up the shrunken
creek, and Younger Brother learned to catch grasshoppers, and ate
juniper berries, while the men sat about the fire hugging their lean
bellies and talking of Dead Man's Journey. This they would do whenever
there was a Hunger in the Country of the Dry Washes, and when they were
fed they forgot it."

The Coyote interrupted his own story long enough to explain that though
there were no buffaloes in the Country of the Dry Washes, on the other
side of the Wall-of-Shining-Rocks the land was black with them. "Now and
then stray herds broke through by passes far to the north in the Land of
the Salmon Rivers, but the people of that country would not let
Howkawanda's people hunt them. Every year, when they went up by tribes
and villages to the Tamal-Pyweack to gather pine nuts, the People of the
Dry Washes looked for a possible trail through the Wall to the Buffalo
Country. There was such a trail. Once a man of strange dress and speech
had found his way over it, but he was already starved when they picked
him up at the place called Trap-of-the-Winds, and died before he could
tell anything. The most that was known of this trail at
Hidden-under-the-Mountain was that it led through Knife-Cut Canon; but
at the Wind Trap they lost it.

"I have heard of that trail, 'said the First Father of all the Dogs to
Howkawanda, one day, when they had hunted too far for returning and
spent the night under a juniper: 'a place where the wind tramples
between the mountains like a trapped beast. But there is a trail beyond
it. I have not walked in it. All my people went that way at the
beginning of the Hunger.'