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Updated: June 17, 2025
By this time the air was so hot that it was hard to breathe without dipping one's mouth constantly in the water, and for the roaring of the flames I could not hear Kahwa whimpering at my side, or the rush of the stream below the dam. And we soon found that we were not alone in the pool.
Kahwa, we felt sure, was somewhere among those houses in the town. But that was little comfort to us. And all the time we wondered what man wanted with her, and why he could not have left us to be happy, as we had been before he came.
Impatiently we waited until it was dark enough to trust ourselves in the open near the houses, and then we soon knew that our fears were justified. The door of the house in which Kahwa had been shut was open; the men went in and out of it, and evidently Kahwa was not there. Nor was there any trace of her about the buildings.
Once in a while, however, I came across a comb that was easy to reach, and the chance of one of those occasional finds made me spend, not hours only, but whole days at a time, looking for the bees' nests. Along by the streams were many blueberry-patches, though none so large as that which had cost Kahwa her life; but during the season I could always find berries enough.
There was a building larger than those around it, with a big door wide open, and from the door and from the windows on either side poured streams of light out into the night. In the middle of the light, and almost in front of the door, was a group of five or six men, and in the centre of the group was Kahwa, tied to a post by a chain which was fastened to a collar round her neck.
Kahwa and the dog were all mixed up together on the ground, and I saw the man stop and stand still a moment and point the thunder-stick at her. And then came that terrible noise of the thunder-stick speaking. Too frightened to see what happened, I took to my heels, and plunged into the wood as fast as I could, without the man or the dog having seen me.
While we were arguing, the time came when I usually left the town for the day, and the immediate thing to be done was to get away from that place and out into the woods, and all went well till we got to the last house in the town. Now, however, Kahwa insisted on going up to snuff around this house.
Kahwa would take her stand with her back against the rock by our door, just at the point where the hill went off most steeply, and it was my business to come charging up the hill at her and try to pull her down. What fun it was! Sometimes I was the one to stand against the rock, and Kahwa tried to pull me down.
As the days went on I grew to think less of Kahwa; the memory of those nights spent in the town, with the lights, and the strange noises, and the warm man-smell all about me, began to fade until they all seemed more like incidents of a dream than scenes which I had actually lived through only a few weeks before.
It was early in the year, when the green shoots were just beginning to appear above the earth; and wherever there was a shoot there was a bulb down below. And a mountain lily bulb is one of the very nicest things to eat that there is so sweet, and juicy, and crisp! The place was some distance from our home, and after that first visit Kahwa and I kept begging to be taken there again.
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