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Updated: May 18, 2025
The Star was given a special welcome and a hut all to itself. Nothing in all their lives had seemed more curious to Umpl and Sptz than those huts. They were made of twigs and reeds wattled into basketwork, and then clay plastered over all until they were water tight, and they were perched on logs driven into the bottom of the lake like piles.
But every time they arrived only to find that the drenching rain had washed out all of the fire but the smell, and that was not very satisfying; so they had to go disconsolately back and take the beating which they were sure to get for disappointing their elders, and had to do a double amount of work besides. It was not all playtime with Umpl and Sptz by any means.
Still, when the other girls showed their best dresses to each other and chattered, and looked over their shoulder at Sptz in her deerskin mantle, some young man with a bracelet on his arm would be quite likely to pass by them and go straight to Sptz with strings of white and pearly beads in his hand beads made from the shells which he had found in lake and river and ask her to make for him a warrior's cloak.
Down it came, crashing through the great limbs of the trees beyond Umpl and Sptz with a huge rushing roar, and when it struck the earth the ground trembled for half a mile around, especially as it glanced from a ledge after diving deep in the soil, and came leaping out of the soil again only to fall with a thud a rod or two away. It is hard to say whether Umpl or Sptz was the more frightened.
When it wasn't they could go outside, or have a smaller fire: and when that ton of rock came down so suddenly on both fire and supper they were not at all surprised. It had happened before; but the father was angry just the same, and said that he would rather it had fallen on Sptz. Girls were not thought so much of in those days as they are now.
Jumping up on the log she looked around, and no, it couldn't be! but it was, though fire. Real fire! Smoking away merrily among the dead leaves where a bit of molten star had been scraped off by a tree trunk and had fallen. Sptz flew to it like a bird.
Elsewhere things might be better. They could not be worse. And he would go with them, taking Sptz, who could cook well, and the Iron Star, which would bring them luck. It seemed a very good idea, especially to youths who had none of their own; and they agreed to form a band and go, if Umpl first would prove the luck of the Star. The youth nodded, and held up his club. "This was made from it.
And there, as she would be standing modestly behind the village girls, yet a full head taller than any of them, and straight as a young pine, with the sunlight flashing on her necklaces, there he would see Sptz. What was to happen next she would not say, even to herself.
Sptz had found many things in that village which were just what she wanted. For one thing, out of the long, shaggy hair of the longer- horned cattle had been found a way of spinning thread and weaving cloth in pretty patterns. Sptz could dress a deerskin beautifully, and make out of it a cloak fit for a warrior to wear, but she had never learned to weave.
For instance, how they went to the place again in after days and found the piece of the fallen star, broken into several pieces. And how Sptz found that one of them was just the thing to crack nuts on, and Umpl found another was quite as good as a bone-cracker, till his father took it from him and made a head of it for his war-club, where it did great bone-cracking in another way.
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