THE SEVEN BROTHERS OF THE SUN
Nashola did not live in fairyland,
although there were seasons when his country was so
beautiful that it might well have belonged to some
such enchanted place. He did not know whether
he loved it best when the thickets were all in bloom
with pink crab apple and the brown, wintry hills had
put on their first spring green, or when every valley
was scarlet and golden with frost-touched maple trees
in the autumn. But to-day it was neither, being
hot midsummer, with the wild grass thick and soft
on the slope of the hill that he was climbing, and
with the heavy foliage of the oak tree on the summit
rustling in a hot, fitful breeze. It was high
noontide with the sunlight all about him, yet Nashola
walked warily and looked back more than once at his
comrades who had dared follow him only halfway up the
hill. His was no ordinary errand, for, all about
him, Nashola felt dangers that he could neither hear
nor see. Before him, sitting motionless as a
statue, with his back against the trunk of the oak
tree and his keen, hawk-like face turned toward the
hills and the sky, was Secotan, the sorcerer and medicine
man, whom all of Nashola’s tribe praised, revered,
and dreaded.
None but the full-grown warriors used
to venture to have speech with him, and then only
as he sat in the door of his lodge, with the men in
a half circle before him. They never came alone.
Along all the seaboard, the Indians talked of Secotan,
the man most potent in spells and charms and prophecies,
who was said to talk with strange spirits in his lodge
by night and who could call up storms out of the sea
at will. This spot at the summit of the hill,
where the medicine man sat so often, sometimes muttering
spells, sometimes staring straight before him across
the valley, was magic forbidden ground, where no one
but himself was known to come. Yet the young Nashola,
only fifteen years old, and far from being a warrior,
had been told that he must consult the medicine man
and had been in too much haste to seek him in his
own lodge or to wait until he could persuade a comrade
to go with him.
Stretched along the river below them
was the camp of Nashola’s brown-skinned people,
where springs gave them fresh water and where the
eastern hills of the valley gave shelter from the winter
storms that blew in from the sea. Beyond those
green hills were rocky slopes, salt swamps, a stretch
of yellow sand, and then the great Atlantic rollers,
tumbling in upon the beach. The Indians of Nashola’s
village would go thither sometimes to dig for clams,
to fish from the high rocks, and even, on occasions,
to swim in the breakers close to shore. But they
were land-abiding folk, they feared nothing in the
forest, and would launch their canoes in the most headlong
rapids of the inland rivers; yet there was dread and
awe in their eyes when they looked out upon the sea.
Not one of them had ever ventured beyond the island
at the mouth of the harbor.
They were a shifting, wandering people,
moving here and there with the seasons, as the deer
and moose moved their grazing grounds, but their most
settled abiding place was this little green valley
where they spent a part of every year. Sometimes
word would come drifting in, through other tribes,
of strange, white-faced men who had landed on their
shores, but who always sailed away again, since this
was still the time when America was all the Indians’
own. What they did not see troubled them little
and they went on, undisturbed, hunting and fishing
and paying their vows to the spirits and demons that
they thought to be masters of their little world.
The old, wrinkled squaw who was Nashola’s
grandmother was the only one of them all who seemed
oppressed with care. The boy, whose parents were
dead, was her special charge and was not, as he should
be, like other Indian lads. He was slim and swift
and was as skillful as his companions with the bow
and spear, but he had a strange love for running along
the sea beach with the waves snatching at his bare,
brown legs, and he was really happy only when he was
swimming in the green water. The day he swam
to the island and back again, paying no heed to the
shouts and warnings of his friends, and declaring,
when he landed, that he would have gone farther save
that the tide had turned that day had brought
his old grandmother’s patience to an end.
“It is not fitting that one
of our tribe should be so familiar with the sea,”
she stormed at him. “We were not born to
master that wild salt water; the gods that rule us
have said over and over again that the woods and rivers
are ours, but that we are to have no dealings with
the spirits of the sea. Since I cannot make you
listen, you shall talk to some one who will.
You shall go to ask the medicine man if what I say
is not so.”
Nashola had come, therefore, to ask
his question, but he found that it needed a bold heart
to advance, without quaking, into that silent presence
and to speak out with Secotan’s black eyes seeming
to stare him through and through.
“Is it true,” he began,
“that men of our tribe should have no trust in
the sea? My grandmother says that I should hate
it and fear it, but I do not. Must I learn to
be afraid?”
Slowly the man nodded.
Most Indians grow old quickly, and
are withered like dried-up apples as soon as the later
years come upon them. But Secotan, although his
hair was gray, had still the clear-cut face with its
arched nose and heavy brows of a younger man.
Only his eyes, deep, piercing, and very wise, seemed
to show how long he had lived and how much he had
learned.
“Our fathers and their fathers
before them have always known that we must distrust
the sea,” he said at last. “No matter
how blue and smiling it may be it can never be our
friend. We may swim near the shore, we may even
launch our canoes and journey, if the way be short,
from one harbor to another when the sky is clear and
the winds are asleep. But always we are to remember
that the sea is our enemy and a treacherous enemy
in the end.”
He turned away to stare at the hills
again, but Nashola lingered, not yet satisfied.
It was unheard-of boldness to question Secotan’s
words, yet the boy could not keep his hot protests
to himself.
“But is it not wrong to pretend
to fear what we do not?” he objected. “Do
the spirits of the water actually rise up and tell
you that we must keep to the shore? I do not
believe it, although my grandmother says so until
my ears ring again.”
Secotan turned his head quickly, as
though to hide the ghost of a smile.
“The voices of the wind and
the breakers and of the thunder all cry the same message,”
he declared, “and wise men have learned that
it warns them to hug the land. You must heed
your grandmother, even though her words are shrill
and often repeated.”
He would say no more, so Nashola went
away, pondering his answer as he walked down the hill.
After all, no harm had come to him from entering the
medicine man’s presence unbidden, as his comrades
had all said. He answered their questions very
shortly as they came crowding about him, and to the
persistent queries of his grandmother he would say
nothing at all. Yet the others noticed that his
canoe lay unused in the shelter of a rock on the sandy
beach where he had left it, and that he swam in the
sea no more.
The days passed, the hot, quiet summer
passing with them. One evening, as they all sat
about the camp fire, one of the older warriors said
quietly:
“The time is near when our medicine
man must go from us.”
“Why?” questioned Nashola’s
grandmother, while the boy turned quickly to hear.
“He has not sat upon the hill
nor before the door of his lodge for three days, and
the venison and corn we have carried to him have lain
untouched for all that time. One of us who ventured
close heard a cry from within and groaning. It
may be that he must die.”
“But will no one help him?”
cried Nashola. It was not proper that a boy should
speak out in the presence of the older warriors, but
he could not keep his wonder to himself.
“There is danger to common folk
in passing too close to the medicine man’s lodge,”
his grandmother explained quickly. “There
are spirits within who are his friends but who might
destroy us. And when he is ill unto death and
the beings from another world have come to bear his
soul away, then must no man go near.”
“Sometimes a medicine man has
a companion to whom he teaches his wisdom and who
takes his place when he is gone,” said the man
by the fire. “But even that comrade flees
away when death is at hand and the spirits begin to
stand close about his master. Yes, such a man
must die alone.”
All through the night Nashola lay
awake, thinking of what he had heard. Secotan
was, he knew, a man of powerful magic, but he could
not forget that there was a look in his eyes and a
kindliness in his tone that seemed human, after all.
Must he suffer and die there, without help, merely
because he was greater and wiser than the rest?
Or, when death came close and the host of unearthly
beings gathered about him, would he not feel it of
comfort to have a living friend by his side?
It was long past midnight and in the black darkness
that comes before day, before the boy came to final
resolution.
He crawled out from under the shelter
of his lodge and slipped noiselessly through the sleeping
camp. Every rustle in the grass, every stirring
leaf in the thicket made him jump and shiver, yet he
kept steadily on. The sharp outline of Secotan’s
pointed lodge poles stood out against the stars, halfway
up the shoulder of the hill. The door showed
black and open as he came near, but there was no sound
from within. The only thing that seemed alive
was a dull, glowing coal in the ashes of a fire that
was not quite dead. The boy stooped down before
the door and spoke in a shaking voice:
“Secotan, Secotan, do you still live?”
A hollow, gasping whisper sounded from the shadows
within:
“I am living, but death is very near.”
Nashola stood still for a moment.
He could picture that gaunt figure lying helpless
on the ground, with the darkness all about peopled
by strange shapes visible to the sorcerer’s
eyes alone, crowding spirits come to carry him away
to an unknown world. But even as a wave of icy
terror swept over him, he remembered how fearful it
would be to lie all alone in that haunted darkness,
and he bent low and slipped through the door.
“I know that all the spirits
of the earth and air and water are with you,”
he said as he felt his way to the deerskin bed and
sat down beside it, “but I thought, among them
all, you might wish for a friend beside you who was
flesh and blood.”
A quivering hand was laid for an instant on his knee.
“There is no man who does not
feel terror when he comes to die alone,” the
medicine man whispered, “and Secotan is less
of a man than you.”
Through the dragging hours Nashola
sat beside him, listening with strained ears to every
sound the soft moving of a snake through
the grass before the door, the nibbling of a field
mouse at the skin of the tent, the sharp scream of
a bird in the wood captured by a marauding owl.
The blackness grew thinner at last, showing the lodge
poles, the shabby skins of the bed, and finally the
sick man’s face, drawn and haggard with pain.
As the dawn came up over the hills, he opened his
eyes and spoke:
“Bring those herbs that hang
against the lodge pole and build up the fire.
When the stones about it are hot, wrap them in wet
blankets and lay them in the tent. The gods may
have decreed that I am to live.”
Nashola worked frantically all through
the day. He filled the lodge with steam from
the hot stones, he brewed bitter drafts of herbs and
held them to Secotan’s lips once in every hour
by the sun. After a long time he saw the fever
ebb, saw the man’s eyes lose their strange glittering,
and heard his voice gather strength each time he spoke.
For three nights and days the boy nursed him, all alone
in the lodge, with men bringing food to leave at the
door but with no one willing to come inside.
When at last Nashola went back to his own dwelling,
Secotan was sitting, by his fire, weak and thin, but
fairly on the way to health again.
The friendship that had grown up during
that night of suffering and terror seemed to become
deeper and deeper as time passed. There was scarcely
a day when Nashola did not climb the hill in the late
afternoon to sit under the rustling oak tree and talk
for a long hour with the medicine man. His companions
of his own age looked askance at such a friendship
and his grandmother begged and scolded, but without
avail.
Almost always, as he sat with his
back against the tree, or lay full length in the long
grass that was beginning to be dry and yellow with
the coming autumn, the boy would fix his eyes upon
the hills opposite through which there showed a gleam
of sea. Like the picture of some forbidden thing
was that glint of blue, framed by the green slopes
and the sky above. He could see the whitecaps,
the dancing glimmer of the sun, and the gray sea gulls
that whirled and hovered and dipped before his longing
gaze. He would lift his head to sniff the salt
breeze that swept through the cleft in the hills,
and to listen for that far-off thunder that could
sometimes be heard as the great waves broke on the
beach. At last, one day when he had sat so long
with his friend that dusk was falling and the stars
were coming out, he broke through the silence with
a sudden question:
“Secotan, what lies beyond that sea?”
The medicine man shook his head without speaking.
“My grandmother says ‘Nothing,’”
pursued Nashola, “but I know that cannot be.
Is it one of the things that I must not ask and that
you may not tell me because you are a sorcerer and
I am only a boy?”
Secotan was silent so long that Nashola
thought he did not mean to reply at all. Even
when he spoke it did not seem to be an answer.
“Do you see those seven stars?”
he said, “that are rising from the sea and that
march so close together that you keep thinking they
are going to melt into one?”
“Yes,” answered the boy.
“I often lie before our lodge door and watch
them go up the sky. There are bigger stars all
about them, but somehow I love those the best, they
are so small and bright and seem to look down on us
with such friendly eyes.”
“It is told among the medicine
men,” Secotan went on slowly, “that many,
many moons ago, long before this oak tree grew upon
this hill, before its father’s father had yet
been planted as an acorn, our people came hither across
just such a sea as that. Far to the westward
it lay, and they came, a mere handful of bold spirits
in their canoes, across a wide water from some land
that we have utterly forgotten. Some settled
down at once upon the shores of the waters they had
crossed, but some pressed eastward, little by little,
as the generations passed. They filled the land
with their children and in the end they came to another
sea and went no farther. But the men who had
led them were of a different heart than ours; there
were always some who were not content to hunt and
fish and move only as the deer move or as the seasons
change. They wished to press on, ever on, to
let nothing stop the progress of their march.
It is said that when they came to this sea there were
seven brothers who, when their people would no longer
follow, launched their canoes and set off once more
to the eastward, and never came back.
“They dwell there in the sky,
we think, and they shine through those months of autumn
that are dearest of all the year to our people, when
the days are warm and golden before the winter, when
the woods are bare and hunting is easy, when the game
is fat from the summer grazing and our yellow corn
is ripe. They come back to us in the Hunter’s
Moon and they watch over us all through the cold winter.
We call them the Seven Brothers of the Sun.”
Nashola was silent, waiting, for he
knew from his friend’s voice that there was
more that he wished to say.
“Your mother, who is dead, was
not of our blood, they tell me. Your father took
her from another tribe and they had brought her captive,
from the north of us, so that she is no kin of ours.
Sometimes I think that there must have run in her
veins the blood of those seven brothers and that,
in you, their bold spirit lives again. There is
no one of your kind who loves the sea as you do, who
has no shadow of a fear of it. And you are first,
in all my life, who has asked me what lay beyond.”
“I should like,” said
Nashola steadily, still watching the gray water and
the gleam of stars above it, “I should like to
go and see.”
“Often I have wondered,”
the man went on, his voice growing very earnest, “whether
you would not like to come to dwell with me, to learn
the lore that makes me a medicine man and to take my
place when I must go. I, who was taught by the
wisest of us all, have waited long to find some one
worthy of that teaching, and able to hold the power
that I have. You can be a greater man than I,
Nashola; not only your whole tribe will do your bidding
and hang upon your words, but the men of our race
all up and down the coast will revere you and talk
of you as the greatest sorcerer ever known. Will
you come to my lodge, will you learn from me, will
you follow in my way?”
Nashola tried to speak, choked and tried again.
“I cannot do it,” he said huskily.
“Why?”
There was a sharp note of wonder,
hurt friendship, even of terror, in the man’s
voice.
“The people of our village say
you are not like other men,” said the boy.
“They say you can call the friendly spirits of
the forest and the hostile gods of the sea, and that
you have wisdom learned in another world. But
I, who am your friend, think it is not so. I love
you dearly, but I know you are a man as I am.
I know the sea is only water and that the forest is
only trees. I I do not believe.”
He got to his feet, blind with misery,
and went stumbling down the hill. The warm September
darkness was thick about him, but up on the hill the
starlight showed plainly the motionless figure sitting
beneath the oak tree, never turning to look after him,
uttering no sound of protest or reproach.
As September days passed into October,
as the Seven Brothers rode higher in the sky, strange
tales, once again, began to come from the south.
More white men had been seen in their ships, sailing
up and down the coast, trading with the Indians, buying
the fish that they had caught and trying to talk to
them in an unknown tongue.
“We have heard stories before
and will hear them again,” said the older warriors
incredulously. “Such tales are of the sort
that old women tell about the fires on winter nights.”
“What does your friend the medicine
man say of these rumors, Nashola?” asked one
of the boys of his own age, but Nashola did not answer.
He went no more up the hill to the big oak tree; he
had held no speech for weeks with Secotan. Yet
he would suffer no one to ask him why.
A day came when the news could no
longer be disbelieved. A boy of the tribe, who
had been digging for clams on the beach, came running
home with startling tidings.
“The white men the
winged canoes as big as our lodges”
he gasped. “Come quickly and see!”
Old men and young, squaws and
papooses, every one deserted the little settlement
by the river and went in wild haste up the eastward
hills to look upon this strange wonder. It was
a lowering day with overcast skies and water of a
sullen gray and with ominously little wind. In
speechless wonder the Indians stood gazing, for there
indeed were three white-sailed ships, moving slowly
before the lazy breeze, stanch little fishing vessels
of English build, come to see whether this unexplored
stretch of coast would yield them any cargo. As
they watched, the largest one got up more sail, veered
away upon a new tack, and was followed by the others.
“What can they be? Are
they come to destroy us all?” asked a trembling
old woman, and no one could answer.
“Hush,” said another in
a moment, “the medicine man is coming.”
Secotan, who so seldom left his own
lodge now, and who never mixed with the village folk,
was climbing slowly up the hill after them. Nashola
noticed that he had begun to look old, that his fierce
hawk’s face was sunken, and that he walked very
slowly, leaning upon his staff. The men and women
drew back respectfully as he advanced and stood in
a silent, waiting circle, while he shaded his eyes
and gazed long at the ships, now growing smaller in
the distance.
“Are they friends or enemies,
Secotan?” one of the hunters ventured to ask,
but the medicine man replied only:
“That must be as the gods decree.”
“Then destroy them for us,”
cried the old squaw, Nashola’s grandmother.
“Call up a storm that will break their wings
and shatter the sides of those giant canoes.
Bring wind and rain and thunder and all the spirits
of the sea to overwhelm them.”
There was a breathless silence as
Secotan slowly moved forward and raised his staff.
Nashola, standing before the other boys, watched the
medicine man’s face with eyes that never wavered.
Even as the sorcerer moved there came a low mutter
of thunder across the gray, level floor of the sea,
and a distant streak of darker water showed the coming
wind.
“There is the storm! The very winds obey
him!”
The cry went up from all the Indians,
save only Nashola who stood silent. The medicine
man turned to look at him, then hesitated and dropped
his eyes.
“Why do you wait? Raise
up a hurricane, O greatest of sorcerers,” cried
a man behind them.
“No,” shouted Secotan
suddenly. He flung down his staff and held up
his empty hands before his face. “I will
raise no storm,” he cried, “I will call
no spirits from the deep because I cannot.
The wind and thunder answer no man’s bidding storms
come and go at the will of the Great Spirit alone.
There is one soul here that I love, one being whom,
in all my life, I have had for a friend. In his
eyes I will stand for truth at last, although I had
almost learned to believe in my magic myself.
I can do none of those things that you think.
I am a man without power, like every one of you!”
A roar of anger went up, a dull, savage,
guttural sound that died away almost at once into
silence, a quiet more ominous than an outcry could
have been. Terrified by that strange apparition
out yonder upon the waters, the Indians saw themselves
deserted by the one person to whom they could look
for courage and counsel. Only half understanding,
they knew, at least, that Nashola had been the means
of their medicine man’s downfall. Frenzied
hands seized them both and dragged them headlong down
toward the water. Visions of the savage tortures
that his people wreaked upon their enemies passed
through the boy’s mind, but he did not struggle
or cry out, although Secotan’s set face, beside
him, turned gray under its coppery skin. Some
one had found Nashola’s canoe, left long unused
upon the beach, and had launched it in the breakers.
“Let him go back to the sea
that he loved, this boy who has never been one of
us. Let the man perish in the storm that is coming
without his call.”
Relentless hands flung them into the
frail boat and pushed it out through the surf.
Nashola crawled to the stern and took up the paddle;
a crash of thunder broke over their heads and a wild
flare of lightning lit the dark water as he dipped
the blade. In a moment, rain was falling in blinding
sheets, the wind and spray were roaring in their ears,
and the ebbing tide was carrying them away, out of
the harbor, past the rocky island, straight to the
open, angry sea.
After a long time, Secotan, who had
lain inert where he had been thrown into the boat,
got to his knees and took up the second paddle.
Only by keeping the little boat’s bow to the
wind could immediate destruction be averted.
But the medicine man’s strokes were feeble,
affording little help, and at last he laid down the
blade.
“It is of no use, Nashola,”
he said. “Death rides on the wind and snatches
at us from the black waters. Lay down your paddle
and let us die.”
“No,” the boy answered,
“even though death is not an hour away, we will
fight it until the very end.”
Darkness shut down about them so that
they could scarcely see each other as they went on
in silence. Although each combing, foam-capped
rush of water seemed certain to overwhelm them, there
was a strange exhilaration, a mad thrill in rising
to every giant wave and shooting down its green side
in a cloud of spray. One two three each
one seemed the last, and yet there were ever more.
Nashola’s arms were numb and heavy, his head
reeled, but still he struggled on. He wished
at last that death would come quickly, to still the
terrible aching weariness that possessed his whole
being. The worst of the storm had blown, roaring,
past them, but the seas were still heavy and nothing nothing,
Nashola thought, could ever bring back the strength
to his failing arms.
Suddenly the clouds were torn apart,
showing a glimmer of stars and a vague glimpse of
the tossing black water all about them.
“Look, look, Nashola,”
cried the medicine man, pointing upward, “they
have come to help us, your kinsmen, the Seven Brothers
of the Sun!”
But Nashola was not looking at the
sky; his eyes were fixed on a ghostly shape moving
close ahead of them and on the fitful gleam of a ship’s
lantern that tossed and glimmered in the dark.
Dropping his paddle he put his hands to his mouth
and lifted his voice in a long hail. The light
bobbed and swung and an answering shout came through
the darkness.
To the weather-beaten English sailors,
used to the rough adventures of sailing new and uncharted
seas, there was little excitement in picking up two
half-drowned Indians, although they had never done
such a thing before. They warmed the two with
blankets, they revived them with fiery remedies, and
they sat about them on the deck, trying to talk to
them by means of signs, but with small success.
“It is no common thing to see
these natives so far from shore,” the mate said
to the captain, “for as a rule the Indians distrust
the sea. We cannot find out how these came to
be adrift in that canoe. The young one tries
to make us understand, but the old man merely covers
his face and groans. I think he will not believe
that we are men like himself.”
“Bring the boy to me,”
the captain ordered. “Perhaps we may be
able to understand him.”
In the quiet dawn, when calm had followed
the night’s storm, the ship ran in toward a
rocky headland to send a boat ashore. Yet when
it had been lowered and Secotan had dropped into it,
he turned to see Nashola standing on the deck above,
making no move to follow.
“I am not coming, Secotan,”
he declared steadily. “The chief of these
men and I have talked with signs and he wishes to carry
me to his home on this strange winged vessel.
He promises that he will bring me safe back again.
Then I can tell you and all of our tribe what these
white men really are. And I have always longed
to know what lay beyond this forbidden sea.”
Secotan did not protest.
“I have called you friend, I
have wished to have you for my brother,” he
said, “but I must call you master now, since
you have dared what I can never dare.”
Much has been said of the courage
of those white men who crossed the stormy Atlantic
in their little vessels to explore an unknown continent.
But what of the brave hearts of those Indians who thought
the white men were spirits come out of the sea, who
did not know what ships were, yet who still dared
to set sail with them? For we know that there
were such dusky voyagers, that they crossed the sea
more than once in the English fishing vessels, and
that they brought back to their own people almost
unbelievable tales of cities and palaces, or harbors
crowded with shipping and of whole countrysides covered
with green, tilled fields. With all these wonders,
however, they could tell their comrades that these
white beings were mere men like themselves, to be
neither hated nor dreaded as spirits of another world.
Deep dwelling in Nashola was that born leadership that
makes real men see through the long-established doubts
and terrors of their race, who can distinguish the
false from the true, who can go forward through shadowy
perils to the clear light of knowledge and success.
It was in recognition of this that
old Secotan, half understanding, wholly unable to
put his feeling into words, standing alone upon the
headland, raised his arms in reverent salute and cried
a last good-by to his comrade:
“Farewell and good fortune, O Brother of the
Sun!”