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Updated: June 6, 2025
But to-day it was neither, being hot midsummer, with the wild grass thick and soft on the slope of the hill that he was climbing, and with the heavy foliage of the oak tree on the summit rustling in a hot, fitful breeze. It was high noontide with the sunlight all about him, yet Nashola walked warily and looked back more than once at his comrades who had dared follow him only halfway up the hill.
"Let him go back to the sea that he loved, this boy who has never been one of us. Let the man perish in the storm that is coming without his call." Relentless hands flung them into the frail boat and pushed it out through the surf. Nashola crawled to the stern and took up the paddle; a crash of thunder broke over their heads and a wild flare of lightning lit the dark water as he dipped the blade.
Nashola, standing before the other boys, watched the medicine man's face with eyes that never wavered. Even as the sorcerer moved there came a low mutter of thunder across the gray, level floor of the sea, and a distant streak of darker water showed the coming wind. "There is the storm! The very winds obey him!" The cry went up from all the Indians, save only Nashola who stood silent.
Yet the young Nashola, only fifteen years old, and far from being a warrior, had been told that he must consult the medicine man and had been in too much haste to seek him in his own lodge or to wait until he could persuade a comrade to go with him.
"Why?" questioned Nashola's grandmother, while the boy turned quickly to hear. "He has not sat upon the hill nor before the door of his lodge for three days, and the venison and corn we have carried to him have lain untouched for all that time. One of us who ventured close heard a cry from within and groaning. It may be that he must die." "But will no one help him?" cried Nashola.
The friendship that had grown up during that night of suffering and terror seemed to become deeper and deeper as time passed. There was scarcely a day when Nashola did not climb the hill in the late afternoon to sit under the rustling oak tree and talk for a long hour with the medicine man.
Yes, such a man must die alone." All through the night Nashola lay awake, thinking of what he had heard. Secotan was, he knew, a man of powerful magic, but he could not forget that there was a look in his eyes and a kindliness in his tone that seemed human, after all. Must he suffer and die there, without help, merely because he was greater and wiser than the rest?
Suddenly the clouds were torn apart, showing a glimmer of stars and a vague glimpse of the tossing black water all about them. "Look, look, Nashola," cried the medicine man, pointing upward, "they have come to help us, your kinsmen, the Seven Brothers of the Sun!"
Nashola had come, therefore, to ask his question, but he found that it needed a bold heart to advance, without quaking, into that silent presence and to speak out with Secotan's black eyes seeming to stare him through and through. "Is it true," he began, "that men of our tribe should have no trust in the sea? My grandmother says that I should hate it and fear it, but I do not.
But always we are to remember that the sea is our enemy and a treacherous enemy in the end." He turned away to stare at the hills again, but Nashola lingered, not yet satisfied. It was unheard-of boldness to question Secotan's words, yet the boy could not keep his hot protests to himself. "But is it not wrong to pretend to fear what we do not?" he objected.
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