as
cool as a warrior who has lived to be aged in scenes of war. While he
sat in his cradle of woven willow, his father chanced to speak in his
hearing of an expedition which the Braves were about to undertake
against the distant Coppermines, who had their lodges on the skirts of
the sea of eternal ice. The wise child bade the father call the chiefs
and counsellors of the nation around him, and to them he said, "You
will not succeed in this war. The Coppermines dwell in the regions of
great cold; before they can be met, icy hills and frozen lakes, and
stormy winds and bleak tempests, must be encountered. If you meet
them, success would be doubtful, for they are on their own hills, with
nerves fitted to endure the searching cold, and possessed of that
which the Andirondacks want--a thorough knowledge of every path that
crosses their snow-clad vales and ice-bound waters. Stay at home,
Braves, help your women to plant corn, and cut up the buffalo-meat,
rather than go upon an expedition from which you will never return. Do
I not see the torturing fires lighted, and Braves wearing the
Andirondack mocassins bound to the stake of death? Do not mine ears
hear a death-song in the Andirondack tongue? And are not these
fearless sounds which come to mine ears the cries of the vulture and
the wolf, fighting for the remains of a human carcase, which hath the
Andirondack tuft of hair? Stay at home, Andirondacks, help your women
to plant corn, and cut up the buffalo-meat, rather than go upon an
expedition from which you will never return."

But the young and ardent warriors said this was the speech of a boy,
and they would not listen to them. They said that, were the words of
Piskaret the words of a man, they might hearken to them, but was he,
who sat in his willow cradle, a fit counsellor to gray-headed sages,
or even to young Braves, who had eaten the bitter root, and put on new
war-shoes, and fasted for six suns, and been made men. In vain did the
boy assure them that his _medicine_, the Great White Owl, had revealed
to him many strange things, and among others this--that if the
Andirondacks engaged in a war against the Coppermines, the wrath of
the Great Spirit, whose worship they had forsaken, would be upon
them, and of those who went not one should ever return. They laughed
at his words, treating them as they would the song of a bird that has
flown over. They bound on their mocassins, and, taking their spears,
and bows and arrows