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Updated: June 6, 2025
"As for Opata, I used to see him sometimes, dancing alone to increase his magic power, I speak but as the people of Taku-Wakin spoke, and once at the edge of the lagoon, catching snakes. Opata had made a noose of hair at the end of a peeled switch, and he would snare them as they darted like streaks through the water.
"Scrag was beginning to get the cows together again; but by that time the people had made up their minds to stay where they were. They built themselves huts on platforms above the water and caught turtles in the bayous. "'Opata has called a Council, Taku told me, 'to say that I must make my Stick talk, or they will know me for a deceiver, a maker of short life for them.
My father had a plan to get to the sea, and a Talking Stick which he was teaching me to understand, but I cannot find it in any of the places where he used to hide it. If I had the Stick I think they would make me chief in my father's place. But if Opata is made chief, then I must give it to him if I find it, and Opata will have all the glory.
I stole up in the dark till I could look over the heads of the villagers squatted about the fire. Opata was making a speech to them. He was working himself into a rage over the wickedness of Taku-Wakin. He would strike the earth with his stone-headed spear as he talked, and the tribe would yelp after him like wolves closing in on a buck.
That was how I began to understand that the Great Plan was really a plan to find a way through the marsh to the sea on the other side of it. "'Opata has the Stick, said Taku, 'but it will not talk to him; therefore he goes, as my father did, when the waters are low and the hummocks of hard ground stand up, to find a safe way for the tribe to follow.
"'And, said Taku-Wakin to me, 'whether Opata or I first sits in it, depends on which one of us can first produce a Sign." "It was the Talking Stick of his father that Taku-Wakin wanted," said Arrumpa. "He still thought Opata might have it, for every now and then Taku would catch him coming back with marsh mud on his moccasins.
His father, he said, had been a strong man who put himself at the head of the five chiefs of the tribe and persuaded them to leave off fighting one another and band together against the enemy tribes. Opata, the man who had wished to kill me, was the man likeliest to be made High Chief in his father's place.
Me they would trap, and take the skin of Saber-Tooth to wrap their cubs in, but at the hint of a Sign, or an old custom slighted, they would grow suddenly afraid. Then Taku looked up and saw Opata stroking his face with his hand to hide what he was thinking.
"Oh, but he was well called 'The Wonderful. I could see the heads of the tribesmen lifting like wolves taking a new scent, and mothers tighten their clutch on their children. Also I saw Opata. Him I watched, for he smelt of mischief. His water-basket was beside him, and as the people turned from baiting Taku-Wakin to believing him, I saw Opata push the bottle secretly with his spear-butt.
Around the ring of the chiefs and elders ran a growl like the circling of thunder in sultry weather, and immediately it was turned into coughing; every man trying to eat his own exclamation, for, as he sat, Taku laid out, in place of a trophy, the five arrows. "'Do we sit at a game of knuckle-bone? said Opata at last, 'or is this a Council of the Elders?
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