The red feathers

Now it happened that Bright Robe, having wandered to the vicinity of Great Devil’s Lake after months of fruitless searching for Wise-as-a-she-wolf, saw Run-all-day, in his waving spruce-branches, flying eastward from the hillside. Of course he thought it was his rival, Wise-as-a-she-wolf.

“He flies with the feathers, not the moccasins,” he muttered, gazing after the grotesque and fast-vanishing figure. “Has he not enough magic to make himself invisible? Or has he forgotten that I have returned to my country?” he added, viciously.

Knowing that it would be useless for him to try to follow the speeding figure, even to keep it in sight, he bent his steps toward that part of the hillside from which he had seen his supposed enemy rise into the air. After a hard climb through the half-melted drifts, he arrived at the lodge of Whispering Grass and found the old woman still crouched by the fire.

“Why have you come back?” she asked, without looking up. “Have you spilled the medicine?”

“It is not Wise-as-a-she-wolf, to whom you speak,” said the visitor. “It is Bright Robe.”

She raised her head and stared at him intently. “And does the great Bright Robe, the defier of the gods, come to poor Whispering Grass for medicine?” she asked.

“Nay, I want none of your mixtures, old woman,” he replied, slipping into the lodge. “But I would know where Wise-as-a-she-wolf set out for, a little while ago.”

The woman smiled secretly, and stirred the pot by the fire. She knew something of the history of both the magicians.

“If that was Wise-as-a-she-wolf, he goes northward,” she said.

“I saw him flying eastward, old woman,” cried the magician. “It is breath wasted that is employed in lying to Bright Robe,” he added sternly.

“Flying?” she queried.

“You need not pretend to doubt it,” answered the man. “He flew like a hawk—for the red feathers were in his moccasins. And he flew eastward, across the lake. Had I seen him sooner, an arrow would have caught up with him, I think.”

“Why did you not fly after him, great chief?” she asked. His face darkened with anger and his eyes glowed like coals in the dusk of the wigwam.

“He has both the moccasins of the wind and the red feathers,” he replied, harshly. “He travels like a bird while I toil along the ground; and yet, let me but stand within fifty strides of him and I shall crush him as a child crushes a nut,” he added, furiously.

“Is not your power great enough to wing your own feet with magic?” asked Whispering Grass, shrewdly.

Bright Robe stepped forward, overturned the pot of medicine with his foot, and then hurried from the lodge. He did not take the trouble to draw his robe above his head and vanish, but stalked across the clearing, slowly and disdainfully.

Whispering Grass snatched a bow and an arrow from the corner and hobbled after the magician, muttering between tears and curses. She caught the gleam of his robe between the dark trees; but, even as she drew the bow, he turned and saw her. Quick as thought, he pulled the magic robe high and stepped aside. In the next instant, the arrow struck the trunk of a fir-tree, and stood quivering in the wood.

“In truth, it was the great magician,” cried the old woman, trembling with fear, and peering anxiously about. He had vanished quicker than the shifting of a sunbeam. She knew that her doom was sealed. A hundred stories of the cruelty of Bright Robe, told to her when she was a child, awoke in her mind. Not once, during his age-long life, had he been known to forgive an injury.

Next moment, with awful suddenness the magician reappeared, close beside her. His face was that of a devil. He let his silver robe fall from his shoulders and raised his club high.

There sounded a swishing in the air, close above them. Then, with a fierce, shrill cry, Bright Robe sprang aside, whirling his club around him so swiftly that it drew gray circles in the sunlight. At the same moment, he snatched for the silver fur which lay on the ground. Twice he lifted a corner of it, and twice it was pulled away from him by some invisible hand. Rage shone in his face like a fire, and horrible sounds escaped from his lips.

The old woman managed to crawl to the edge of the wood; and there she crouched, sobbing with terror and yet unable to remove her gaze from the frantic scene. She realized that the cruel magician had been attacked by some invisible power even while his club was raised to kill her and that now he fought a terrific battle, handicapped by not being able to see his antagonist. Her eyes and brain were keen, but her body was numb; and so she continued to crouch, with the bow still held in one withered hand.

At last the robe of white fur skin vanished from the ground. Its owner dashed here and there in the sunlit clearing, roaring like a wounded animal and slashing the air with his club. Suddenly he halted, listening, then, with a shrill scream, he dashed toward the tree in which stood the arrow Whispering Grass had shot at him. But before he had crossed half the intervening space, the arrow vanished from the tree trunk. Turning short, with a movement so powerful and quick as to seem scarcely human, he sprang toward the old woman. Almost in the same instant of time the bow was snatched from her hand, apparently into empty air. At sight of that, Bright Robe threw himself flat on the sodden snow, his great body shook and dwindled,—and behold, a slim, white hare darted from the empty clearing into the forest.

An hour passed. The old woman crawled to her wigwam and squatted in the doorway. Several times she heard a strange noise in the air, as of a swift small wind. But the tree-tops were not stirred by it. The flames of the little fire behind her sank and the coals faded to black and gray. The sun stood midway in the southern sky, and cast a straight shaft of light through the smoke-hole in the roof of the lodge. But Whispering Grass gave no heed to either the fire or the sun, but gazed out, eager yet fearful, for more wonders to be enacted in the quiet clearing.

The sun slid a hand’s-breadth to the westward and the shaft of light ran crooked in the dusk of the lodge. A tumult of crashing branches arose on the upper slopes of the hill and descended toward the clearing. Out of the shelter broke Bright Robe, now in his human form, but many times increased in stature, struggling with and clinging to some unseen body in his arms. His club was gone and blood ran down his great breast from a gash in the shoulder. He put his gigantic muscles to every trick of wrestling, showing no fatigue, and yet he was forced backward and downward, and sometimes swung almost clear of the ground. Sweat streamed from his great face, and stood like dew on his body, from which his shirt of dressed leather had been torn.

The desperate battle wrenched and twisted half-way down the clearing. There, for a dozen seconds, it paused, as if the strength of the invisible one had slackened. Then, with redoubled violence, Bright Robe was forced backward again, flung from side to side, battered, staggered, and overborne. Now his face, for the first time, shone with the pitiful, inner illumination of fear. He screamed in his anguish of spirit and bent all his strength to clear himself from the grasp of the invisible enemy. He hurled his gigantic body this way and that, dragging backwards and sideways. Half-grown trees were snapped off by the straining feet of the wrestlers. Blood dyed the trampled snow,—more blood than that which ran from Bright Robe’s wound. At last, beyond the fringe of trees at the lower edge of the clearing, the evil magician fell, crashing, to the ground. A scream of fear and baffled passion clanged across the wilderness, ringing from wood to wood and waking terrific echoes against every hillside. For a little while there continued a sound of gigantic struggling.

Whispering Grass was still squatting on the threshold of her lodge, when a young man issued from the woods where the fight had so lately ended, and limped toward her. His clothing of fine white leather, set out with bright stones, was torn and blood-stained. Blood streamed down across his face and breast from a gash on his forehead. Even the moccasins on his feet were torn and dyed with blood. The sight of his pitiful condition drove the numbness of fear from the old woman and she hobbled forward and helped him into the lodge and onto her own couch of spruce-branches and furs.

“I am in sore need of your healing, Whispering Grass,” said the youth, faintly.

“Lie quiet,” she replied. “In a few days you will be able to tell me how you came by these grievous hurts.”

But her curiosity pricked her shrewdly to know if this young man had been mixed in the terrific battle, part of which she had so lately witnessed. And did he know anything of the Unseen One who had vanquished Bright Robe? She washed the wounds on the stranger’s head and breast, and bound them with dried leaves of medicinal virtue. She gave him a draught that was both vivifying and soothing. He was already nodding when she removed the torn coverings from his feet, to attend to the cuts and bruises thereon that puzzled her even more than the hurts on his body. His eyes flashed open.

“Give me the moccasins,” he cried, eagerly, extending a hand.

“I will make you a new pair,” she said. “These are past mending.”

“Not so,” he replied. “Give them to me, I pray you. Place them under my head.”

She humoured him, smiling the while at his foolishness. Within a minute, his eyes were closed in slumber.