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"There is my friend," said the hunter, pointing to his companion, "who with me owns this bear which we are carrying home. Suppose you see if you can change him into a piece of rock." "Very well," said Manabozho; and he had scarcely spoken before the other hunter became a rock. "Now change him back again," said the first hunter. "That I can't do," Manabozho answered; "there my power ends."
One of them obeyed, and coming near to Manabozho, he presented him the other end of his own bushy tail, which was nicely seasoned with burs, gathered in the course of the hunt. Manabozho jumped up and called out: "You dog, now that your stomach is full, do you think I am going to eat you to get at my dinner? Get you gone into some other place."
Manabozho waited a day to see what would happen. Then he heard birds scratching on the body, and all at once the rays of light broke in. He could now see the heads of the gulls, which were looking in at the opening they had made. "Oh!" cried Manabozho, "my younger brothers, make the opening larger, so that I can get out."
Schoolcraft's volume, which he chose to entitle "The Hiawatha Legends," has not in it a single fact or fiction relating either to Hiawatha himself or to the Iroquois deity Taronhiawagon. Wild Ojibway stories concerning Manabozho and his comrades form the staple of its contents.
Some of the winds, too, were personal existences. The West-Wind, as we have seen, was father of Manabozho. There was a Summer-Maker and a Winter-Maker; and the Indians tried to keep the latter at bay by throwing firebrands into the air. When we turn from the Algonquin family of tribes to that of the Iroquois, we find another cosmogony, and other conceptions of spiritual existence.
"Here," said he, "this is the way we do!" and left him in disdain, carrying his bill high in the air, and stepping over the door-sill as if it were not worthy to be touched by his toes. After this visit, Manabozho was sitting in the lodge one day with his head down. He heard the wind whistling around it, and thought that by attentively listening he could hear the voice of some one speaking to him.
Manabozho received the old red-headed woodpecker with great ceremony.
Manabozho lifted up a huge war-cry, beat his drum, took the scalp of the Manito as his trophy, and calling the woodpecker to come and receive a reward for the timely hint he had given him, he rubbed the blood of the Shining Manito on the woodpecker's head, the feathers of which are red to this day.
Hunters who have been crossing the mountain, and have come to the trees at sunset, say that they have seen a beautiful girl there in company with a handsome youth, who vanished as they approached. Manabozho made the land. The occasion of his doing so was this. One day he went out hunting with two wolves.
Putting his clubs and arrows in order, just at the dawn of day Manabozho began his attack, yelling and shouting, and beating his drum, and calling out in triple voices: "Surround him! surround him! run up! run up!" making it appear that he had many followers. He advanced, shouting aloud: "It was you that killed my grandfather," and shot off a whole forest of arrows.
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