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Updated: June 11, 2025
"Taku-Wakin fiddled with the arrows, laying them straight, hardly daring to look up at Opata, for if the chief had his father's cut stick, now would be the time that he would show it. Out of the tail of his eye he could see that the rest of the Council were startled. That was the way with men.
"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.
He looked about the company for permission to begin, and then addressed himself to Arrumpa. "You spoke, Chief Two-Tails, of the 'tame wolves' of Taku-Wakin; were they wolves, or " "Very like you, Wolfling, now that I think of it," agreed the Mastodon, "and they were not tame exactly; they ran at the heels of the hunters for what they could pick up, and sometimes they drove up game for him."
Thus I watched, while Taku-Wakin played for his life with the people's minds, and Opata watched neither the people nor him, but the unstopped mouth of the water-bottle. "I looked where Opata looked, for I said to myself, from that point comes the mischief, and looking I saw a streak of silver pour out of the mouth of the bottle and coil and lift and make as a snake will for the nearest shadow.
"'Wait here, under the Arch, said Taku-Wakin, 'till I see if the arrow of my thought finds a cleft to stick into. "So we waited, watching the white, webby moons of the spiders, wet in the grass, and the man huts sleeping on the hill, and felt the Dawn's breath pricking the skin of our shoulders. The huts were mere heaps of brush like rats' nests.
When he sat up at last and saw me blowing dust on the spear-cut in my side to stop the bleeding, he gathered broad leaves, dipped them in pine gum, and laid them on the cut. Then I blew dust on these, and seeing that I was more comfortable, Taku-Wakin that was what I learned to call him saluted with both hands to his head, palms outward.
'Now we shall have the less to carry. But the mother of Taku-Wakin made a terrible outcry. In the place where her hut had been she had found the Talking Stick of Taku's father, trampled to splinters. "She had had it all the time hidden in her bundle. Long-Hand had told her it was Magic Medicine and she must never let any one have it.
"Boomerangs!" cried the children, delighted. "We called it the Stick-which-kills-flying," said the Indian, and hid it again under his blanket. "Taku-Wakin thought it Magic Medicine," said the Mastodon. "It was a Sign to him. Two or three times he threw the stick and always it came back to him.
He was no fool, and he saw that if the election was pressed, Taku-Wakin, boy as he was, would sit in his father's place because of the five arrows. Taku-Wakin stood up and stretched out his hand to the Council. "'Is it agreed, O Chiefs, that you keep my father's place until there is a Sign? and a deep Hu-huh ran all about the circle.
"Taku-Wakin slapped my trunk. "'Now by the oath of my people, you shall walk, he said. 'If the herds begin to move, and if no hurt comes to anybody by it, you shall walk; for as long as they are comfortable, even though the Rod should speak, they would not listen.
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