e east
seemed like a lifting gate of light. The great moon was rising.

Hark! At the first ray of the moon there are heard low, mysterious sounds
everywhere. The forests are full of them--calls, like the coyote's bark,
or bird-calls, or secret signals. They are human voices. They answer each
other. There are thousands of voices calling and answering.

The full moon now hangs low over the forests, golden as the morning sun in
the mists of the calm sea. There is a piercing cry and a roll of
war-drums, and suddenly the edges of the forest are full of leaping and
dancing forms. The plateau is alive as with an army. Pipes play, shells
rattle, and drums roll, and the fantastic forms with grotesque motions
pass and repass each other.

Up the Columbia comes a fleet of canoes like a cloud passing over the
silvery ripples. The river is all alive with human forms, and airy paddles
and the prows of tilting boats.

The plateau swarms. It is covered with waving blankets and dancing plumes.
All is gayety and mirth.

There is another roll of drums, and then silence.

The circling blankets and plumes become motionless. The chief of the
Cascades is coming, and with him is Benjamin and his young bride, and
Gretchen.

The royal party mount the platform, and in honor of the event the
torch-dance begins. A single torch flashes upon the air; another is
lighted from it, another and another. A hundred are lighted--a thousand.
They begin to dance and to whirl; the plateau is a dazzling scene of
circling fire. Gretchen recalled the old _fetes_ amid the vineyards of the
Rhine in her childhood.

Hither and thither the circles move--round and round. There is poetry in
this fire-motion; and the great army of fire-dancers become excited under
it, and prepared for the frenzy of the Spirit-dance that is to follow.

The torches go out. The moon turns the smoke into wannish clouds of white
and yellow, which slowly rise, break, and disappear.

There is another roll of drums. Wild cries are heard in the forests. The
"biters" are beginning their hunt.

Who are the biters? They are Indians in hides of bears and wolves, who run
on their hands and feet, uttering terrible cries, and are followed by
women, who, to make the scene more fearful, pretend to hold them back, and
restrain them from violence. The Spirit-dance is held to be a sacred
frenzy, and before it begins the biters are charged to hunt the woods for
any who have not joined the army of d