United States or Saint Vincent and the Grenadines ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And Neewa, stretching himself, gave a great yawn. Meshaba, the old Cree, sat on the sunny side of a rock on the sunny side of a slope that looked up and down the valley. Meshaba who many, many years ago had been called The Giant was very old.
But this did not interest him, except that if it had not been in his line of vision he could have seen a mile farther down the valley. In that hour of Sphinx-like watching, while the smoke curled slowly up from his black pipe, Meshaba had seen life. Half a mile from where he was sitting a band of caribou had come out of the timber and wandered into a less distant patch of low bush.
His pipe fell from his mouth to his hand; and he stared without moving, stared like a thing of rock. On a flat sunlit shelf not more than eighty or ninety yards away stood a young black bear. In the warm glow of the sunlight the bear's spring coat shone like polished jet. But it was not the sudden appearance of the bear that amazed Meshaba.
Meshaba would not have shot that eagle, for year after year it had come down through time with him, and it was always there soaring in the sun when spring came. So Meshaba grunted as he watched it, and was glad that Upisk had not died during the winter. "Kata y ati sisew," he whispered to himself, a glow of superstition in his fiery eyes.
Instinctively he seized upon it as a menace at least as something that he would rather NOT smell than smell. So he turned away with a warning WOOF to Miki. When Meshaba peered around the edge of the rock, expecting an easy shot, he caught only a flash of the two as they were disappearing. He fired quickly.
A huge, big-boned beast that stood as high at the shoulders as Wakayoo, the bear; a great beast, with a great head, and It was then that Meshaba's heart gave another thump, for the tail of a wolf is big and bushy in the springtime, and the tail of this beast was as bare of hair as a beaver's tail! "Ohne moosh!" gasped Meshaba, under his breath "a dog!"
Still farther away he had seen a hornless moose, so grotesque in its spring ugliness that the parchment-like skin of his face had cracked for half an instant in a smile, and out of him had come a low and appreciative grunt; for Meshaba, in spite of his age, still had a sense of humour left. Once he had seen a wolf, and twice a fox, and now his eyes were on an eagle high over his head.
The dark spruce and cedar forest edged in the far side of the valley; between that and the ridge rolled the meadowy plain still covered with melting snow in places, and in others bare and glowing, a dull green in the sunlight. From where he sat Meshaba could also see a rocky scarp of the ridge that projected out into the plain a hundred yards away.
Could Miki have spoken Cree, and had Meshaba given him the opportunity, he might have explained the situation. "You see, Mr. Indian" he might have said "this dub of a bear and I have been pals from just about the time we were born. A man named Challoner tied us together first when Neewa, there, was just about as big as your head, and we did a lot of scrapping before we got properly acquainted.
Nature had made them enemies. Nature had fore-doomed their hatred to be the deepest hatred of the forests. Therefore, for a space, Meshaba doubted his eyes. But in another moment he saw that the miracle had truly come to pass. For the wolf turned broadside to him and it WAS a wolf!
Word Of The Day