United States or Liberia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"'We have a treaty with the Dine, he said. 'Besides, I was out rehearsing with the Koshare last night toward Shut Canon; if there had been Dine I should have seen them. "It was then that I was aware of Tse-tse's hand creeping along my shoulders to hide the bristling. "'He is afraid, said Tse-tse to me in the cave; 'you saw it. Yet he is not afraid of the Dine.
Always he made believe that Tse-tse or I had started it, and one night he tried to throw me out by the skin of my neck, and I turned in his hand How was I to know that the skin of man is so tender? and his smell was the smell of a man who nurses grudges.
Then came Tse-tse, and as he turned the little Koshare over in his hand, I saw that there were many things had come into his head which would never come into mine. Presently I heard him laugh as he did when he had hit upon some new trick for splitting the people's sides, like the bubble of a wicker bottle held under water. He took my chin in his hand.
'Without doubt, he said, 'this is Kokomo's; he would be very pleased if you returned it to him. I understood it as an order. "I carried the little Delight-Maker to Kokomo that night in the inner court, when the evening meal was over and the old men smoked while the younger sat on the housetops and moaned together melodiously. Tse-tse looked up from a game of cherry stones.
But after I had carried back the little Delight-Maker to Kokomo, there were no signs of the four-colored arrow, which was the invitation to the Uakanyi, and young men whom Tse-tse had mimicked too often went about pretending to discover Dine wherever a rabbit ran or the leaves rustled. "Tse-tse behaved very badly.
The next picture was a sort of enlarged and elongated house fly, apparently, of sombre grey color, with a narrow body, thick proboscis and wings that overlapped like the blades of a pair of shears. "This," he went on, "is a picture of the now well known tse-tse fly found over a large area of Africa. It has a bite something like a horse-fly and is a perfect blood- sucker.
"We did not know yet whether they had seen us, but as we began to move again cautiously, a fox barked in the scrub that was not a fox. Off to our left another answered him. So now we were no longer hunters, but hunted. "Tse-tse slipped his tunic down to his middle and, unbinding his queue, wound his long hair about his head to make himself look as much like a Dine as possible.
"When a fox barked again, Tse-tse answered with the impudent folly of a young kit talking back to his betters. Evidently the man on our left was fooled by it, for he sheered off, but within a bowshot they began to close on us again. "We had come to a thicket of mesquite from which a man might slip unnoticed to the head of the gully, provided no one watched that particular spot too steadily.
"Tse-tse looked right and left to see who listened. 'Kokomo is a strong man in Ty-uonyi, he said; 'it was he who made the treaty with the Dine. And Pitahaya is blind. "'Aye, said the turkey girl; 'when you are a Delight-Maker you can make a fine jest of it. "She had been brought up a foundling in the house of the old chief and was fond of him.
But the day after Willow-in-the-Wind told Tse-tse that Kokomo meant to have him elected to the Koshare if only to keep him from making a mock of Kokomo, we went up over the south wall hunting. "It was all flat country from there to the roots of the mountains; great pines stood wide apart, with here and there a dwarf cedar steeping in the strong sun.
Word Of The Day