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The bank is steep here, flanked by a swamp of huge spruce trees criss-crossed by the log-jam of centuries. The reason for the ill omen of the place is plain enough a long point running out with three sides exposed to a bellowing wind.
One morning early the young man asked his father-in-law to come and hunt with him. They went to the log-jam and the old man drove out the buffalo and his son-in-law killed a fat buffalo cow. Then he said to his father-in-law, "Hurry back now to the camp and tell your daughters to come and carry home the meat, and then you can have something to eat."
Now, the son-in-law was a person of much mysterious power, and he kept the buffalo hidden under a big log-jam in the river. Whenever he needed food and wished to kill anything, he would take his father-in-law with him to help.
And perhaps the very closest of all his close calls came one day when some river-drivers exploded a stick of dynamite in the water to break up a log-jam. The trout was some distance up the stream at the time, but the concussion stunned him so that he floated at the surface, wrong side up, for several minutes before his senses gradually came back. That is a fish's way of fainting.
Next morning a crier went through the state proclaiming that there was a log-jam on the river and that it behoved all loyal subjects to remove it. The people poured down from their villages to the moist warm valley of poppy-fields; and the King and I went with them.
It dammed up vast unsalable surpluses, helping to bring about unemployment and suffering in the United States and everywhere else. To point the way to break up that log-jam our Trade Agreements Act was passed based upon a policy of equality of treatment among nations and of mutually profitable arrangements of trade.
It was a glorious feast they had that early afternoon beside the shaded creek. Five times Thor knocked fish out from under the scum, but for the life of him Muskwa could not eat more than his first trout. For several hours after their dinner they lay in a cool, hidden spot close to the log-jam. Muskwa did not sleep soundly.
The gaiety in his voice clouded a little as he said it, and his grin, for a moment, had a rueful twist. But for a moment only. Then his untempered delight in the possession of his old friends took him again and, with the exception of one or two equally momentary cloud-shadows, lasted all evening. They talked heavens how they talked! It was like the breaking up of a log-jam.
Except for the good heart of the youngest daughter they would have died of hunger. Another day the son-in-law rose early in the morning and went over to the old man's lodge and kicked against the poles, calling to him, "Get up now and help me; I want you to go and stamp on the log-jam to drive out the buffalo."
Presently he went on down to the log-jam, and as he got near the place he saw the old man at work there, bending over, skinning a buffalo; for Kut-o-yis´, when he had seen the son-in-law coming, had lain down on the ground and hidden himself behind the carcass.
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