“I remember that these men gave me food—warm food—and that after a long sleep I awoke and saw a Jesuit missionary kneeling at my bedside.
“It was then that I tasted the full sweetness of my triumph. The priest was _blessing me!_ He spoke of the Christlike kindness of Zephyr Recontre, who had not deserted his sick master.
“I did not see Latour again. The Jesuit’s party had chopped a hole in the ice and had given his body to the river.”
NOW this is the story of one who walked not with his people, but with a dream.
To you I tell it, O White Brother, yet is it not for you, unless you also have followed the long trail of hunger and thirst—the trail that leads to no lodge upon the high places or the low places, by flowing streams or where the sand wastes lie.
It shall be as the talking of a strange tribe to you, unless you also have peered down the endless trail, with eyes that ached and dried up as dust, and felt your pony growing leaner and shadow-thin beneath you as you rode, until at last you sat upon a quiet heap of bones and peered and peered ahead.
Moon-Walker was he called—he who walked for the moon. But that was after he had called his pony from the grazing places and mounted for the long ride. Yet was there a time when he ran about among the lodges laughing very merrily with many boys and girls, who played with hoop and spear, made little bloodless wars upon unseen peoples, and played in little ways the big, sad games of men. And then he was called by many names, and all of the names, though different, meant that he was happy.
But once his mother and his father saw how that a man began to look out of his eyes, began to hear a man talking in his throat; and so they said: “It is the time for him to dream.”
So they sent him at nightfall to the hill of dreams—as is the custom of our people.
_Wahoo!_ the bitter hill of dreams! Many have I seen go up there laughing, but always they came down with halting feet and with sadness in their faces. And among these many, lo! even I who speak—therefore should my words be heard.
And he of the many names went up into the hill of dreams and dreamed. And in through the mists that strange winds blow over the hills of sleep burst a white light, as though the moon had grown so big that all the sky was filled from rim to rim, leaving no place for sun and stars. And upon the surface of the white light floated a face, an awful face—whiter than the light upon which it floated; and so beautiful to see that he of the many happy names ached through all his limbs, and cried out and woke. Then leaping to his feet, he gazed about, and all the stars had grown so small that he looked thrice and hard before he saw them; and the world was shrunken.