or fishing and to
draw the nets alone. Go out and wring them now, where they are freezing
with the water that is in them; hang them up to dry in the sunshine, and
show that you are worth the food that you eat and the clothes you wear
on your back."

Without a word Kwasind rose from the ashes where he was sitting, left
the lodge and found the nets dripping and freezing fast. He wrung them
like a wisp of straw, but his fingers were so strong that he broke them
in a hundred different places, and his strength was so great that he
could not help breaking the nets any more than if they were tender
cobwebs.

"Lazy Kwasind!" his father said to him, "you never help me in my
hunting, as other young men help their fathers. You break every bow you
touch, and you snap every arrow that you draw. Yet you shall come with
me and bring home from the forest what I kill."

They went down to a deep and narrow valley by the side of a little
brook, where the tracks of bison and of deer showed plainly in the mud;
and at last they came to a place where the trunks of heavy trees were
piled like a stone wall across the valley.

"We must go back," said Kwasind's father; "we can never scale those
logs. They are packed so tightly that no woodchuck could get through
them, and not even a squirrel could climb over the top," and the old man
sat down to smoke and rest and wonder what they were going to do; but
before he had finished his pipe the way lay clear, for the strong
Kwasind had lifted the logs as if they were light lances, and had hurled
them crashing into the depths of the forest.

"Lazy Kwasind!" shouted the young men, as they ran their races and
played their games upon the meadows, "why do you stay idle while we
strive with one another? Leave the rock that you are leaning on and join
us. Come and wrestle with us, and see who can pitch the quoit the
farthest."

Kwasind did not say a word in answer to them, but rose and slowly turned
to the huge rock on which he had been leaning. He gripped it with both
hands, tore it from the ground and pitched it right into the swift
Pauwating River, where you can still see it in the summer months, as it
towers high above the current.

Once as Kwasind with his companions was sailing down the foaming rapids
of the Pauwating he saw a beaver in the water--Ahmeek, the King of
Beavers--who was struggling against the savage current. Without a word,
Kwasind leaped into the water and chased the beaver in and