So she went into a closed room. Down in the corner stood a water jar, beautifully painted and as bright as new. It looked like other water jars, but it was not. It was wonderful, wonderful! for it was covered with a stone lid which held down many may-flies and gnats and mosquitoes. The maiden lifted the lid and began to speak to the little animals as though she were praying.
“Now, then, my children, this day fly ye forth all, and in the corn-fields by the river there shall ye see a young man hoeing. So hard is he working that he is stripped as for a race. Go forth and seek him.”
“_Tsu-nu-nu-nu_,” said the flies, and “_Tsi-ni-ni-ni_,” sang the gnats and mosquitoes; which meant “Yes,” you know.
“And,” further said the girl, “when ye find him, bite him, his body all over, and eat ye freely of his blood; spare not his armpits, neither his neck nor his eyelids, and fill his ears with humming.”
And again the flies said, “_Tsu-nu-nu-nu_,” and the mosquitoes and gnats, “_Tsi-ni-ni-ni._” Then, _nu-u-u_, away they all flew like a cloud of sand on a windy morning.
“Blood!” exclaimed the young man. He wiped the sweat from his face and said, “The gods be angry!” Then he dropped his hoe and rubbed his shins with sand and slapped his sides. “_Atu!_” he yelled; “what matters--what in the name of the Moon Mother matters with these little beasts that cause thoughts?” Whereupon, crazed and restless as a spider on hot ashes, he rolled in the dust, but to no purpose, for the flies and gnats and mosquitoes sang “_hu-n-n_” and “_tsi-ni-ni_” about his ears until he grabbed up his blanket and breakfast, and ran toward the home of his fathers.
“_Wa-ha ha! Ho o!_” laughed a young man in the Tented Pueblo to the north, when he heard how the lover had fared. “_Shoom!_” he sneered. “Much of a man he must have been to give up the maid of Mátsaki for may-flies and gnats and mosquitoes!” So on the very next morning, he, too, said to his old ones: “What a fool that little _boy_ must have been. I will visit the maiden of Mátsaki. I’ll show the people of Pínawa what a Hámpasawan man can do. Courage!”--and, as the old ones said “Be it well,” he went as the other had gone; but, pshaw! he fared no better.
After some time, a young man who lived in the River Town heard about it and laughed as hard as the youth of the Tented Pueblo had. He called the two others fools, and said that “girls were not in the habit of asking much when one’s bundle was large.” And as he was a young man who had everything, he made a bundle of presents as large as he could carry; but it did him no good. He, too, ran away from the may-flies and gnats and mosquitoes.