ay green and
glossy as a grove of oaks in the Buck-Moon, when their leaves are
fully expanded to meet the warm and cheering rays of the great star
of day. In the centre of this valley was a small lake fringed with
willows, alders, pemines, and grape-vines. It was not altogether bare
of trees, though they were few and scattered as a party of shamefaced
warriors straggling home from a beaten field. Here perhaps stood a
lofty pine with several little ones around it, resembling a happy
father with his children at his knee partaking of the fruits of his
hunt--yonder, a cedar, lone and solitary as a man whose friends have
all been killed by an unskilful _autmoin_(5) in the Fever-Moon. Well
did the woman deem that the cold breath of the boisterous and stormy
Matcomek[A] had never reached the spot--it seemed as if it had never
been visited by anything more rough than the south wind in the time of
spring.

[Footnote A: The God of the winter.]

As this woman, who had followed the child of the Hare into the woods
at early nightfall, stood chewing a piece of the hot root which takes
away the crying sin of barrenness, and renders women fruitful and
beloved[A], there came to her ears a sound as of many angry voices
mingling their accents together. Filled with a womanly curiosity to
know what it was, and anxious to behold the combat which it promised,
she stepped quickly over the small hillock which intercepted her view
of a part of the valley. What a scene burst upon her eyes! Upon a
grassy knoll, shaded from the beams of the rising sun by the range of
hills I have spoken of, were assembled a greater number of Elks than
even my brother could count by the aid of his great medicine[B]. In
the centre of the assembled nation, stood an Elk of wondrous stature,
the great chief, or as my brother would call it, the King of the
Valley. He was so large, that the biggest of his people seemed but
musquitoes by the side of a buffalo. His legs were so long, that the
deepest snow-drift was no impediment to his running his blithest race;
and his skin, which was covered with red and grey hair, was proof
against the utmost fury of the Ottawa bender of the bow. From each of
his shoulders proceeded an arm, which well supplied the place, and
performed the uses, of the same limb among our people. His eyes were
of the size of the largest bison-hide, and the antlers, which towered
above his head, resembled an oak which decay has stricken to the
disrobing