"Not so far, but they had to stay from planting to harvest. Of what use
was the seed without knowledge. Traveling hard they crossed the River of
the White Rocks and reached, by the end of that moon, the mountain
overlooking the Country of Stone Houses. Here the men stayed.
Waits-by-the-Fire arranged everything. She thought the people of the
towns might hesitate to admit so many men strangers. Also she had the
women put on worn moccasins with holes, and old food from the year
before in their food bags."

"I should think," began Dorcas Jane, "they would have wanted to put on
the best they had to make a good impression."

"She was a wise woman," said the Corn Woman; "she said that if they came
from near, the people of the towns might take them for spies, but they
would not fear travelers from so far off that their moccasins had
holes in them."

The Corn Woman had forgotten that she was telling a story older than the
oaks they sat under. When she came to the exciting parts she said "we"
and "us" as though it were something that had happened to them all
yesterday.

"It was a high white range that looked on the Country of Stone Houses,"
she said, "with peaks that glittered, dropping down ridge by ridge to
where the trees left off at the edge of a wide, basket-colored valley.
It hollowed like a meal basket and had a green pattern woven through it
by a river. Shungakela went with the women to the foot of the mountain,
and then, all at once, he would not let them go until Waits-by-the-Fire
promised to come back to the foot of the mountain once in every moon to
tell him how things went with us. We thought it very childish of him,