At no time in the history of mankind, except during that brief Paradisiac courtship in the Garden of Eden, has the heart of a lover been altogether unvexed by the presence, or even the sheer suspicion, of that baleful being commonly denominated "another." Here, however, it would seem that the field must needs be almost as clear. The aspect of the world was as if yet young; the swan, long ago driven from the rivers, still snowily drifted down the silver Tennessee; the deer, the bear, the buffalo, the wolf in countless hordes roamed at will throughout the dense primeval wildernesses; the line of Cherokee towns along the banks represented almost the only human habitations for many hundred miles, but to Tus-ka-sah the country seemed to groan under a surplus of population, for there yet dwelt right merrily at Ioco Town the youthful Amoyah, the gayest of all gay birds, and a painful sense of the superfluous pressed upon the brain at the very sight of him.
This trait of frivolity was to Tus-ka-sah the more revolting, since he himself was of a serious cast of mind and possessed of faculties, rare in an Indian, which are called "fine business capacity." He was esteemed at an English trading-house down on the Eupharsee River as the best "second man" in any of the towns; this phrase "second man" expressing the united functions of alderman, chief of police, chairman of boards of public improvements, and the various executive committees of civilization. His were municipal duties,—the apportionment of community labor, the supervision of the building of houses and the planting of crops, the distribution of public bounty, the transaction of any business of Ioco Town with visitors whom individual interest might bring thither. So well did he acquit himself when these errands involved questions of commercial policy that the English traders were wont to declare that Tus-ka-sah, the Terrapin, had "horse sense"—which certainly was remarkable in a terrapin!
His clear-headed qualities, however, valued commercially, seemed hardly calculated to adorn the fireside. In sensible cumbrous silence and disastrous eclipse he could only contemplate with dismayed aversion the palpable effect of Amoyah\'s gay sallies of wit, his fantastic lies, his vainglorious boastings, and his wonderful stories, which seemed always to enchant his audience, the household of the damsel to whom in civilized parlance they were both paying their addresses. These audiences were usually large, and far too lenient in the estimation of Tus-ka-sah. First there was present, of course, Amoyah himself, seeming a whole flock instead of one Pigeon. Then must be counted Altsasti, who although a widow was very young, and as slight, as lissome, as graceful as the "wreath" which her name signified. She was clad now in her winter dress of otter skins, all deftly sewn together so that the fur might lie one way, the better to enable the fabric to shed the rain; the petticoat was longer than the summer attire of doeskin, for although the tinkle of the metal "bell buttons" of her many garters might be heard as she moved, only the anklets were visible above her richly beaded moccasins. She seldom moved, however; sitting beside the fire on a buffalo rug, she monotonously strung rainbow-hued beads for hours at a time. Her glossy, straight black hair was threaded with a strand of opaque white beads passing through the coils, dressed high, and copiously anointed with bear\'s oil, and on her forehead she wore a single pendant wrought of the conch-shell, ivory-white and highly polished. She maintained a busy silence, but the others of the group—her father, sometimes her mother and grandmother and the younger sisters and brothers—preserved no such semblance of gravity, and indulged in appreciative chuckles responsive to Amoyah\'s jests, idly watching him with twinkling eyes as long as he would talk.
It would be difficult to say how long this might be, for there were no windows to the winter houses of the Cherokees; in point of architecture these structures resembled the great dome-shaped council-house, plastered within and without with red clay; the floor was some three feet lower than the surface of the ground outside, and the exit fashioned with a narrow winding passage before reaching the outlet of the door. The sun might rise or set; the night might come or go; no token how the hour waxed or waned could penetrate this seclusion. The replenishing of the fire on the chimneyless hearth in the centre of the floor afforded the only comment on the passage of time. Its glow gave to view the red walls; the curious designs of the painted interior of the buffalo hides stretched upon them, by way of decoration; the cane divans or couches that were contrived to run all around the circular apartment, and on which were spread skins of bear and panther and wolves, covering even the heads of the slumbering members of the household, for the Cherokees slept away much of the tedious winter weather.
The fire would show, too, how gayly bedight and feather-crested was Amoyah, wearing a choice garb of furs;—often, so great was his vanity, his face was elaborately painted as if for some splendid festive occasion, a dance or the ball-play, instead of merely to impress with his magnificence this simple domestic circle. Tus-ka-sah dated the events that followed from one night when this facial decoration of his rival was even more fantastic than usual. Like a fish was one side of the young Cherokee\'s profile; the other in glaring daubs of white and black and red craftily represented the head of a woodpecker. The effect in front was the face of a nondescript monster, that only a gleeful laughing eye, and now and then a flash of narrow white teeth, identified as the jovial Amoyah, the Pigeon of Ioco.
The snow lay on the ground without, he said as he shook a wreath of it from a fold of his fur and it fell hissing among the coals. The shadows were long, he told them, for the moon was up and the world was dimly white and duskily blue. The wind was abroad, and indeed they could hear the swirl of its invisible wings as it swooped past; the boughs of the trees clashed together and ice was in the Tennessee River. The winter had come, he declared.
Not yet, Tus-ka-sah pragmatically averred. There would be fine weather yet.
For the snowfall so early in the season was phenomenal and the red leaves were still clinging to the trees.
Had they been together among men Amoyah would not have cared enough for the subject to justify contention, but in the presence of women he would suffer no contradiction. He must needs be paramount,—the infinitely admired! He shook his head.
The winter had surely come, he insisted. Why, he argued, the bears knew,—they always knew! And already each had walked the round with his shadow.
For in the approach of winter, in the light of the first mystic, icicled moon, the night when it reaches its full, a grotesque pageant is afoot in that remote town of the bears, immemorially fabled to be hidden in the dense coverts of the Great Smoky Mountains,—the procession of the bears, each walking with his shadow, seven times around the illuminated spaces of the "beloved square."
The bears knew undoubtedly, the "second man," the man of facts and method and management, soberly admitted. But how did Amoyah know that already they had trodden those significant circles, each with his shadow? He smiled triumphant in his incontrovertible logic.
And now Amoyah\'s face was wonderful to view, whether as a fish on one side or a woodpecker on the other, with that most human expression of surprise and indignation and aversion as distinctly limned upon it as if in pigments, for he loved the "second man\'s" facts no more than the "second man" loved his fancies. How did he know, forsooth? Because, Amoyah hardily declared, he himself had witnessed the march,—he had been permitted to behold that weird and grotesque progress!
He took note of the blank silence that ensued upon this startling asseveration. Then emboldened to add circumstance to sheer statement he protested, "I attended the ceremony by invitation. I had a place in the line of march—I walked beside the Great Bear as his shadow!"
For, according to tradition, each bear, burly, upright in the moonlight, follows the others in Indian file, but at the side of each walks his shadow, and that shadow is not the semblance of a bear, but of a Cherokee Indian!
Now, as everybody has heard, the bears were once a band of Cherokee Indians, but wearying of the rigors and artificialities of tribal civilization they took to the woods, became bears, and have since dwelt in seclusion.
The thoughts, however, persistently reach out for the significance of the fact that in the tradition of this immemorial progress each creature is accompanied by the shadow, not of the thing that he is, but of the higher entity that he was designed to be.
Whether this inference is merely the mechanical deduction of a lesson, or a subtlety of moralizing, with a definite intention, on the part of the Cherokees, always past-masters in the intricacies of symbolism, it is difficult to determine, but the bears are certainly not alone in this illustration of retrogression, and memory may furnish many an image of a lost ideal to haunt the paths of beings of a higher plane.
The picture was before the eyes of all the fireside group,—the looming domes of the Great Smoky Mountains, where the clouds, white and opaline, hung in the intervals beneath the ultimate heights; the silences of the night were felt in the dense dark lonely forest that encompassed the open spaces of that mysterious city, with the conical thatched roofs of its winter houses and the sandy stretch of the "beloved square; "—and there was the line of bears, clumsy, heavy-footed, lumbering, ungainly, and beside each the feather-crested similitude of what he had been, alert, powerful, gifted with human ingenuity, the craft of weapons, mental endowment, and an immortal soul,—so they went in the wintry moonlight!
There was naught in this detail of the annual procession of the bears, always taking place before the period of their hibernation, that surprised or angered Tus-ka-sah; but that they should break from their ancient law, their established habit of exclusiveness, single out Amoyah (of all the people in the world), summon him to attend their tribal celebration, and participate in their parade, as the shadow of Eeon-a, the Great Bear,—this passed the bounds of the possibilities. This fantasy had not the shreds of verisimilitude!
Yet even while he argued within himself Tus-ka-sah noted the old warrior\'s gaze fix spellbound upon Amoyah, the hands of Altsasti petrify, the bead in one, the motionless thread in the other. The eyes of the more remote of the group, who were seated on rugs around the fire, glistened wide and startled, in the shadow, as Amoyah proceeded to relate how it had chanced.
A frosty morning he said it was, and he was out in the mountain a-hunting. He repeated the song which he had been singing, and the wind as it swirled about the house must have caught his voice and carried it far. It was a song chronicling the deeds of the Great Bear, and had a meaningless refrain, "Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!" But when he reached the advent upon the scene of the secondary hero, the Great Bear himself, very polite, speaking excellent Cherokee ("since we are alone," he said), very recognizant of the merits of Amoyah,—the fame of which indeed was represented to have resounded through the remotest seclusions of the ursine realm,—fiction though it all obviously was, the man of facts could no longer endure this magnification of his rival.
"The great Eeon-a said all that to you?" he sneered. "The fire-water at the trading-house makes your heart very strong and your tongue crooked. This sounds to me like the language of a simple seequa, not the Great Bear—a mere bit of an opossum!"
Amoyah paused with a sudden gasp. He was not without an aggressive temper, albeit, persuaded of his own perfection, he feared no rival, and least of all Tus-ka-sah.
"You, Tus-ka-sah," he retorted angrily, "have evidently strongly shaken hands with the discourse of the opossum, speaking its language like the animal itself, and also the wolfish English. You have too many tongues, and, more than all, the deceitful, forked tongue of the snake, which is not agreeable to the old beloved speech. For myself, the Great Bear made me welcome in the only language that does not make my heart weigh heavy,—the elegant Cherokee language."
The spellbound listeners had broken out with irritated protests against the interruption, and Tus-ka-sah said no more.
As the blasts went sonorously over the house and the flames swirled anew into the murky atmosphere of the interior, a weird, half-smothered voice suddenly invaded the restored quiet of the hearthstone: "Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!"
Like an echo the barbaric chant vibrated through the room. One of the sleepers, a half-grown youth, had semi-consciously caught the familiar refrain and sang it in that strange uncanny voice of slumber. The tones gave fitting effect to the grotesque details of the supernatural adventure, and as Tus-ka-sah rose and surlily took his way toward the door his departure did not attract even casual notice from the listeners, hanging enthralled upon the words of the Great Eeon-a, so veraciously repeated for their behoof. Their eyes showed intent even in the murky gloom and glistened lustrous in the alternate fitful flare; the red walls seemed to recede and advance as the flames rose and fell; the sleeping boy on the broad bed-place stirred uneasily, flinging now and again a restless arm from out the panther skins in which he was enveloped, and ever and anon his cry, "Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!" punctuated the impressive dramatic tones of the raconteur.
The next instant Tus-ka-sah was in the utter darkness of the narrow tortuous little passage, but after threading this he came out of the doorway into the keen chill air of a snowy world, the scintillations of frosty stars, the languid, glamourous radiance of the yellow moon, low in the sky, and his accustomed mental atmosphere of the plainest of plain prose. His thoughts were with the group he had just left, and he marveled if no influence could be brought to reduce the prestige with which the immaterial chief of the bears, the fabled Eeon-a, had contrived to invest the illusory Amoyah.
Tus-ka-sah\'s expectations concerning the weather were promptly justified. A continual dripping from the roofs and trees pervaded the early hours of the morning, and soon the snow was all gone here in the valley; even the domes of the mountains so early whitened with drifts showed now a bare, dark, sketch-like outline against the horizon and above the garnet tint of the massed sere boughs of the forests of the slopes. A warm sun shone. Not a summer bird was yet lingering, but here and there a crisp red leaf winged the blue sky as gallantly as any crested cardinal of them all. The town of Ioco was now astir, and Tus-ka-sah noted how the softening of the air had brought out the inhabitants from their winter houses. Children played about the doorways; boys in canoes shot down the shimmering reaches of the river; warriors congregated in the council-house and the half-open buildings surrounding the "beloved square," and in its sunny sandy spaces sundry old men were placidly engaged in the game of "roll the bullet."
It was at this group that Tus-ka-sah looked with an intent gaze and a sort of indignant question in his manner, and presently an elderly Cherokee, one of the cheera-taghe of the town, detached himself from it and came toward him. Despite this show of alacrity Cheesto distinctly winced as he contemplated the sullen and averse mien of his client or parishioner, for the relation in which Tus-ka-sah stood toward him partook of the characteristics of both. The professional wiseacre, however, made shift to recover himself.
"I will tell you what you have come to tell me," the prophet said quickly. "The spell on Amoyah does not work."
Tus-ka-sah assented surlily, gazing meanwhile at the face of the conjurer. It was a face in which the eyes were set so close together as to suggest a squint, although they were not crossed. He had an uncertain and dilatory tread, the trait of one who hesitates, and decides in doubt, and forthwith repents; being in his prophetic character an appraiser of the probable, and the sport of the possible. He wore many beads in strings around his neck, and big earrings of silver, heavy and costly. His fur garments reached long and robe-like almost to his feet, the shaggy side of the pelt outward, the weather being damp, for when it was dry and cold it was customary to wear the fur turned inward.
The wise man had been recently unfortunate in his sorcery. The corn crop had been cut short by reason of a lack of rain which he had promised should fall in June. He had justified the drought, in the opinion of most of the Indians, by feigning illness and taking to his bed; for by these it was believed that if he had been able to be up and about his ordinary vocations the preposterous conduct of the weather must needs have been restrained. The fields about Ioco had suffered especially, and Tus-ka-sah, as the chief business man of that town, had manifested half veiled suspicions that the art of the conjurer was incompetent; this rendered Cheesto particularly solicitous to succeed when his magic had been invoked to reduce the attractions of Amoyah in the eyes of Altsasti and turn her heart toward Tus-ka-sah. For among the Indians the l............