Tatanka was silent a while, and stopped paddling.
“The missionaries,” he admitted, “are our friends and I believe they tell us the truth. They do not want our land and they do not cheat us as some of the traders do. They say our beliefs in spook lakes and bad medicine are superstition, but it is hard to forget our beliefs, because our fathers have taught them to us for many generations.
“My father once took me along on a buffalo hunt far west and he showed me a spook lake. The hunters camped on the shore of the lake, but none of them would have been brave enough to paddle a canoe on its waters. Some of them would not even gather the dead wood on its shore, but my father told us boys to gather the wood and we did. Our women used the wood to smoke and dry the buffalo meat, and we boys watched for the bad spirits to fly out of the wood.
“I did not see the spirits, but some of the boys told me that they heard the spirits whistle and howl and rise with the smoke after the sun had gone down, and they said that Katinka, the medicine man, saw them, too.”
“Where is that spook lake?” the boys asked, also forgetting to paddle.
“That spook lake,” Tatanka continued, “lies far west on the plains, which the white men call Dakotah. No trees grow on the plains, but trees and bushes grow on the lake shore and many dead trees and stumps grow in the water. Our people call it the Lake of the Stumps. The water was so bitter that we could not drink it, but our horses drank it.”
Bill and Tim dipped a handful of the brown water from Reelfoot Lake.
“It isn’t bitter,” both exclaimed at once. “This isn’t a spook lake.”
“Did your horses die, after they drank out of Stump Lake?”
“Then it wasn’t a haunted lake,” both of them argued.
“But why did the trees die?” Tatanka objected.
“May be the outlet became choked and the trees were drowned,” Barker explained. “You know that white trappers always catch plenty of mink and muskrats and find good fish in the lakes which the Indians say are haunted.”
Tatanka began to paddle again, but looked as if he were not convinced but had given up arguing against all three of his friends.
The scene spread out before them looked indeed weird and almost forbidding. A dead forest of tall straight cypress spires arose like tree specters from the dark waters of the lake. The gray trunks had long ago been stripped of bark and branches; a few bald eagles and fish-hawks sailed in spirals over the dead pointed poles and uttered a shrill, piercing cry at the intruders of their solitude.
