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"We were both prisoners of the Lenape. So we considered ourselves; we waited to see what he would do about it. Toward evening he went off for an hour and returned with a deer which he dressed very skillfully and gave us to eat. Then, of the wet hide, he made a bandage for Ongyatasse's knee, which shrunk as it dried and kept down the swelling.
"I dropped instantly, for I did not know what this might mean, and creeping cautiously to the spot where I had last seen them, I saw the earth opening in a sharp, deep ravine, at the bottom of which lay Ongyatasse with one leg crumpled under him. I guessed that the Lenape must have led him to the edge and then slipped aside just in time to let the force of Ongyatasse's running carry him over.
There did not seem to be anything to say, so we said nothing, but presently, when I could sit up, he washed the cut on the back of my head, and then he showed me that Ongyatasse's knee was out of place, and said that we ought to pull it back before he came to himself.
Toward daylight the lame knee began to give trouble. White Quiver came back and put his shoulder under Ongyatasse's, so we moved forward, wordlessly. Birds awoke in the woods, and hoarfrost lay white on the crisped grasses. "On a headland from which the lake glinted white as a blade of flint on the horizon, we waited the sunrise.
As it turned out we were not wrong in thinking he loved us. As we stood making out the points of direction for the trail, Ongyatasse's knee gave under him, and as White Quiver put out his arm without thinking, a tremor passed over them. They stood so leaning each on each for a moment.
He was about Ongyatasse's age, as handsome as a young fir. Probably he had a name in his own tongue, but we called him White Quiver. Few of us had won ours yet, and his was man's size, of white deerskin and colored quill-work. "Our mothers, to keep us out of the way of the Big Eating which they made ready for the visiting chiefs, had given us some strips of venison.
To save the game, we told him, which seemed to us reasonable; though I think from that hour we began to feel that the Tallegewi, with all their walled towns and monuments, had been put somehow in the wrong by the wild tribes of Shinaki. "We stayed on in the ravine, waiting on Ongyatasse's knee, until we saw the new rim of the Halting Moon curled up like a feather.
"That was a true name for many of us," said the Mound-Builder. "I remember Ongyatasse's shrill eagle cry above the 'G'we! G'we! of the Lenni-Lenape, and the next thing I knew I was struggling in the river, bleeding freely from a knife wound, and somebody was pulling me into a canoe and safety." "And Ongyatasse ?" The children looked at the low mound between the Council Place and the God-House.
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