CHAPTERXHOW THE CARAVAN SET FORTHWhenthe great feast was over and the guests had gone home, it was time to begin in earnest preparations for the caravan. This had been discussed by the headmen in the intervals of feasting and entertainment, and it had been agreed that one of the best-known wizards of that country should come and make luck charms and see that everything was properly done when the company took its departure. As this village was farther down the river than the others, it was to be the place of meeting.Among other matters, the men from different villages had discussed what goods were most likely to be profitable in trading. They all agreed that the traders were not like the Bantu people, who prefer to do the same things and follow the same customs year in and year out; the traders were forever changing their minds. Things which used to be much in demand were now not wanted. The older men, for example, could remember how, when they were boys, camwood and barwood and African mahoganywere asked for. It was said that in some parts of the forest it paid even now to take ebony and teak and other kinds of lumber to the coast. But this was only where the logs could go down by water. There were too many rapids and the distance was too great to make any such trade profitable for this village.Camwood is very good for cabinet work; it is light brown when cut, and with exposure to the air turns a beautiful deep red-brown. Barwood is sometimes used for violin bows. Both these trees are cousins of the California redwoods, though they do not grow to be giants. But in the days when the traders bought the wood, it was not for cabinet work; it was for dyestuffs. Before aniline dye was invented, the rich dull red of Madras handkerchiefs was made by boiling the chips of these woods in water. Such a dye would not fade like the colors in the cloth now sold by the traders.The most profitable thing found in the great forest storehouse was rubber. Mpoko himself had helped get some of the supply of it that was waiting to go down to the coast. This work of getting rubber is done usually in August, or from October to March during the dry season, when there is not so much to do on the farms andit is pleasanter to work in the woods. The women prepare about three weeks’ food for the rubber gatherers, who camp in the woods while the work goes on.tapping a treeThe latex, or sap, is collected in various ways. A cut may be made in the tree and a broken bottle, a large snail shell, or a gourd fastened below to receive the sap. Rubber is also obtained from lianas or vines which are sometimes cut up to let the sap drain into basins from both ends of the stem at once. Toward evening or in the early morning the sap is collected and put into iron pots. It is a rather thick, milky juice, and the rubber is separated from the watery fluid either by boiling or by adding lime juice or tannin squeezed from wild fruits. Then it is dried, in the form of strips, or strips rolled into a ball, or flat cakes, over the smoke of a wood fire. Sometimes it is soakedin streams to clear out the impurities, a practice which adds to its weight but is not honest. One man can collect three or four pounds a day, for which the trader will pay a shilling a pound.Another thing that was going into the packs of the porters now was raffia. In the old days this was never valuable. Now there seemed to be a market for it. It was first exported in 1890, the price then being from $300 to $350 a ton. Later it was about $100. Long before it was known to our schools for basket making and mat making, the Bantu people used the long, tough strips for netting, weaving, and many other purposes.When the men went into the forest to add raffia and some other things to their stock for the trading journey, Mpoko and Nkula went with them. The forest was a wonderful place even to them, who had never known any other country, and to a civilized boy it would have looked like fairyland. Monkeys leaped and chattered in the branches, and birds of many sorts, many of them splendid in coloring, hopped and flew among the trees. There were wild canaries, waxbills, crows, now and then a red-tailed gray parrot, and the bright-colored plantain-eater, or touraco, as the boys called it.This bird, a distant cousin of the cuckoo, has a crest like a jay’s, which it can raise or lower, and its call sounds almost exactly like “touraco, tu-ra-co!” The queerest-looking bird of all, perhaps, was the ground hornbill, which is as common about African villages as a crow. This bird looks as if it had been trying to imitate the rhinoceros, for it has a great horny bill with a thick lump on what might be called the bridge of the nose. It is useful to the villager, for it is a sort of street cleaner in feathers, and eats garbage, rats, snakes, lizards, and other small creatures, with great relish.ground hornbillMpoko and Nkula caught a bunting to take home and tame, and they came upon a little group of the dome-shaped huts of the weaver bird. On the way home the party went out of its way to the Red Rocks. This was the name the boys had for them, but the place was really an outcrop of iron ore, red with rust from the air and the dampness. While the men weregetting out some lumps of ore to be made into weapons, the boys went exploring and found something surprising on their own account.In a little clearing farther up the mountain, great yellow globes were shining on the ground among coarse vines. They were pumpkins. But how came pumpkins away up there, miles away from any farm or house? It really looked like witchery. But when the hunters saw them they laughed and said that the boys had happened on the Elephant’s Garden. These had sprung up from seeds of the pumpkins carried off by elephants from some settlement.If the loads had not already been heavy enough, more of the pumpkins would have been carried away, and as it was, the two which Mpoko and Nkula carried were quite heavy enough before they had a chance to drop them. Iron was more important just then.Nkula’s father was the smith and ever since they could remember, Nkula and Mpoko had watched the business of making iron tools and weapons. Very few boys outside the jungle know as much as these two did about the way in which iron is made into useful articles.The iron as it is found in that country is not so mixed with other minerals as to be hard toseparate. Sometimes a lump would be found almost pure. But in order to make it suitable for the blacksmith’s hammer, it had to be smelted. A furnace was made of clay, and a hole was dug in the ground, big enough to sink it in. Around this hole a clay wall was built up into a sort of chimney, and a tunnel was dug from a little distance away, down to the charcoal fire at the bottom of the furnace. The fire, which must be kept up to the very greatest possible heat, was fed with fresh air through this tunnel by means of a goatskin bellows with a stone nozzle. After two or three hours of uninterrupted heat, there would be a lump of pig iron, and the impurities could be hammered out and the metal worked into shape on a forge.Nkula’s father knew how to make spear heads, ax heads, knives with leaf-shaped or curved blades, and iron wire, which, when passed red-hot over buffalo horn, blackened and became nearly rust-proof. Iron wire could also be polished and used for ornaments, although the people preferred brass wire, which would not rust. Among the things which Nkunda’s mother treasured was a necklace of grayish-brown mottled nuts like pairs of little pyramids set base to base, fastened together, not by a string,but by little links of iron wire. A cross formed of the nuts made a kind of pendant, and although nobody in the village knew it, the necklace had probably been made in some coast village, for a rosary, from the nuts of a eucalyptus or “fever tree” near a mission settlement.While the preparations for the expedition were going on, even the monkeys appeared to know that it was a busy time, and they leaped and chattered and swung from tree to tree as if they too had important affairs on hand. As the Alo Man watched them, he was reminded of the story of the Scrawny Old Man and the Scrawny Old Woman.making a spear headI often tell [said he] of the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman who lived in a hut in the forest. They always complained of being very poor and having hardly enough to eat, but by and by the neighbors noticed that after the two had visited at any house, something or other was always missed. Then one day a neighbor who was sick in bed awoke to see them going out of his hut with his bag of cowrie shells between them. He shouted and shouted at them, but they did not stop, and after a while some of the other neighbors heard and came running in to see who was being murdered.“Oh, oh, oh!” wailed the poor sick man. “The scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman have been here, and they have taken all my cowries and gone away!”The neighbors looked at one another and nodded. They told the sick man not to wail and weep any more, for they would attend to getting back his bag of cowries.Then they went all together to the house of the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman and said, “Give us back the bag of cowries that you stole from the poor sick man, or we will beat you with whips of hippopotamus hide!”hut in forestBut the scrawny old man and the scrawnyold woman cried and howled and said that they had not taken the bag of cowries. And when the neighbors searched the hut they did not find it.But the neighbors still believed that the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman had taken the bag of cowries, and they said, “We will come with our whips of hippopotamus hide and you shall eat whip until you give back the cowries that you stole.”Then while the neighbors went to fetch their whips, the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman climbed up and got the bag of cowries, which they had hidden in the thatch of the roof, and ran with it into the forest. But they were not quite quick enough. The neighbors saw them and came after them so fast with their whips of hippopotamus hide, that at last the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman had to climb into a tree.“You shall not come down from the tree,” cried the neighbors, looking up at the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman where they squatted among the branches, “until you give back the cowries that you stole from the poor sick man.”“We will stay in this tree until they go away,and then we will climb down and escape,” said the scrawny old man to the scrawny old woman.The neighbors heard what he said, and they shouted, “We will stay under the tree until you come down.”“When they go home to get their supper we will climb down and run away very fast in the dark,” said the scrawny old woman to the scrawny old man.The neighbors heard her, and they shouted, “We will build huts under the tree and take turns watching for you to come down.”And so they did.Days passed, then weeks, then months. The scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman sat in the tree waiting for the neighbors to go away, and the neighbors sat under the tree waiting for them to come down. The scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman became very hungry. First they ate the fruit of the tree; then they ate the kernels; then they ate the young leaves; then they ate the old leaves; at last they stripped the bark off the branches and ate that. They grew scrawnier and scrawnier every day. Their eyes had sunk in their heads with sleeplessness. Their teeth grew long and sharp with cracking the kernelsof the fruit and gnawing the bark from the tree. They almost forgot how to talk.One day the scrawny old man held out his scrawny old hand and said, “See how tough the skin is!” And the scrawny old woman held out her scrawny old hand and said, “My hand is just as tough as yours!”Then they looked at their feet and saw that the skin of their feet had grown tough also; and their toe nails and finger nails had grown long, like claws, with holding on so firmly to the branches of the tree.“It is very strange,” said the scrawny old man.“Indeed, it is very strange,” said the scrawny old woman.Then the new year came with its heavy rains, and the scrawny old man and scrawny old woman shivered with cold. One morning the scrawny old man said to the scrawny old woman, “This is very strange. You are all covered with hair.”And the scrawny old woman said to the scrawny old man, “It is surely very strange, but so are you.”It really seemed as if they were not the same persons that they were when they climbed into the tree.Then one morning the scrawny old man said to the scrawny old woman, “I have a very strange feeling at the end of my spine.”“So have I!” said the scrawny old woman. “What can be going to happen now?”And behold, each had a tail just beginning to grow!monkeys on tree branchThe Jackal says it was then that the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman began to chatter and shriek at each other as if they had lost their wits, but no one can tell whether or not they were blaming each other for the strange things that had happened to them, because from that day to this no one has been able to understand what they say. Certain it is that when they found their appearance was so completely changed, they began to leap from one branch to another and from one tree to another, and so escaped from the neighbors, who were stillat the foot of the tree, waiting for them to come down. But they let go the bag of cowries in their flight, and it fell to the ground and was picked up by the neighbors, who carried it back to the poor sick man.And from that day to this the People of the Trees have all been little scrawny old men and old women who chase one another from tree to tree, and chatter and shriek and quarrel, and sometimes come down and steal things from the huts, but very seldom are able to keep what they have stolen. And from that day to this they have not forgotten that they once were people and lived in a village, for they build little huts in the branches for their young ones, and are always watching what the people of the village do and trying to be like them.It is not known whether the monkey story had anything to do with it or not, but during the final preparations for the trading expedition there was no quarreling and things went on in a very orderly and businesslike fashion.When the carriers had all come in from the other villages, there were more than a hundred all together, and last of all the medicine man made his appearance. He was a little, wizened,shrewd-looking old fellow who carried a charm bag and a wooden fetich image which nobody would have touched for anything. It must have been at least three or four hundred years old, for it was a stumpy carved statue of a Portuguese sea captain in the dress of the sixteenth century, and the wood had turned almost black with age. Nobody in Africa could possibly have seen anything like it for many generations, and naturally it was thought to be magic.medicine manThe medicine man called all the headmen together and sat them down in a circle, he and his fetich occupying the middle. On his head was a crown of gay feathers, and his costume was made up chiefly of rattles, beads, and ornaments of magical power. He made a little speech to the fetich, asking it to give good luck to the caravan, to keep it safe from danger of water, flame, or iron, and to make it successful in its dealings. Then he sacrificed a chickento the fetich, and the chicken was solemnly cooked and eaten by the company. No one in the caravan could after that enter his house or turn back upon the road. The medicine man selected charms from those in his charm bag—herbs, spices, feathers, and little bones—and put them in a shell which he set in the middle of the trail. Then the caravan was ready to start. The long procession of traders, porters, headmen, and soldiers moved in a swinging stride down the path, each one stepping over the shell and not looking back. No one touched the shell, which was very lucky, and whether the medicine man’s ceremonies had anything to do with it or not, the expedition returned safely in due time, with a tale of good luck on the trail and success in the trading.
Whenthe great feast was over and the guests had gone home, it was time to begin in earnest preparations for the caravan. This had been discussed by the headmen in the intervals of feasting and entertainment, and it had been agreed that one of the best-known wizards of that country should come and make luck charms and see that everything was properly done when the company took its departure. As this village was farther down the river than the others, it was to be the place of meeting.
Among other matters, the men from different villages had discussed what goods were most likely to be profitable in trading. They all agreed that the traders were not like the Bantu people, who prefer to do the same things and follow the same customs year in and year out; the traders were forever changing their minds. Things which used to be much in demand were now not wanted. The older men, for example, could remember how, when they were boys, camwood and barwood and African mahoganywere asked for. It was said that in some parts of the forest it paid even now to take ebony and teak and other kinds of lumber to the coast. But this was only where the logs could go down by water. There were too many rapids and the distance was too great to make any such trade profitable for this village.
Camwood is very good for cabinet work; it is light brown when cut, and with exposure to the air turns a beautiful deep red-brown. Barwood is sometimes used for violin bows. Both these trees are cousins of the California redwoods, though they do not grow to be giants. But in the days when the traders bought the wood, it was not for cabinet work; it was for dyestuffs. Before aniline dye was invented, the rich dull red of Madras handkerchiefs was made by boiling the chips of these woods in water. Such a dye would not fade like the colors in the cloth now sold by the traders.
The most profitable thing found in the great forest storehouse was rubber. Mpoko himself had helped get some of the supply of it that was waiting to go down to the coast. This work of getting rubber is done usually in August, or from October to March during the dry season, when there is not so much to do on the farms andit is pleasanter to work in the woods. The women prepare about three weeks’ food for the rubber gatherers, who camp in the woods while the work goes on.
tapping a tree
The latex, or sap, is collected in various ways. A cut may be made in the tree and a broken bottle, a large snail shell, or a gourd fastened below to receive the sap. Rubber is also obtained from lianas or vines which are sometimes cut up to let the sap drain into basins from both ends of the stem at once. Toward evening or in the early morning the sap is collected and put into iron pots. It is a rather thick, milky juice, and the rubber is separated from the watery fluid either by boiling or by adding lime juice or tannin squeezed from wild fruits. Then it is dried, in the form of strips, or strips rolled into a ball, or flat cakes, over the smoke of a wood fire. Sometimes it is soakedin streams to clear out the impurities, a practice which adds to its weight but is not honest. One man can collect three or four pounds a day, for which the trader will pay a shilling a pound.
Another thing that was going into the packs of the porters now was raffia. In the old days this was never valuable. Now there seemed to be a market for it. It was first exported in 1890, the price then being from $300 to $350 a ton. Later it was about $100. Long before it was known to our schools for basket making and mat making, the Bantu people used the long, tough strips for netting, weaving, and many other purposes.
When the men went into the forest to add raffia and some other things to their stock for the trading journey, Mpoko and Nkula went with them. The forest was a wonderful place even to them, who had never known any other country, and to a civilized boy it would have looked like fairyland. Monkeys leaped and chattered in the branches, and birds of many sorts, many of them splendid in coloring, hopped and flew among the trees. There were wild canaries, waxbills, crows, now and then a red-tailed gray parrot, and the bright-colored plantain-eater, or touraco, as the boys called it.This bird, a distant cousin of the cuckoo, has a crest like a jay’s, which it can raise or lower, and its call sounds almost exactly like “touraco, tu-ra-co!” The queerest-looking bird of all, perhaps, was the ground hornbill, which is as common about African villages as a crow. This bird looks as if it had been trying to imitate the rhinoceros, for it has a great horny bill with a thick lump on what might be called the bridge of the nose. It is useful to the villager, for it is a sort of street cleaner in feathers, and eats garbage, rats, snakes, lizards, and other small creatures, with great relish.
ground hornbill
Mpoko and Nkula caught a bunting to take home and tame, and they came upon a little group of the dome-shaped huts of the weaver bird. On the way home the party went out of its way to the Red Rocks. This was the name the boys had for them, but the place was really an outcrop of iron ore, red with rust from the air and the dampness. While the men weregetting out some lumps of ore to be made into weapons, the boys went exploring and found something surprising on their own account.
In a little clearing farther up the mountain, great yellow globes were shining on the ground among coarse vines. They were pumpkins. But how came pumpkins away up there, miles away from any farm or house? It really looked like witchery. But when the hunters saw them they laughed and said that the boys had happened on the Elephant’s Garden. These had sprung up from seeds of the pumpkins carried off by elephants from some settlement.
If the loads had not already been heavy enough, more of the pumpkins would have been carried away, and as it was, the two which Mpoko and Nkula carried were quite heavy enough before they had a chance to drop them. Iron was more important just then.
Nkula’s father was the smith and ever since they could remember, Nkula and Mpoko had watched the business of making iron tools and weapons. Very few boys outside the jungle know as much as these two did about the way in which iron is made into useful articles.
The iron as it is found in that country is not so mixed with other minerals as to be hard toseparate. Sometimes a lump would be found almost pure. But in order to make it suitable for the blacksmith’s hammer, it had to be smelted. A furnace was made of clay, and a hole was dug in the ground, big enough to sink it in. Around this hole a clay wall was built up into a sort of chimney, and a tunnel was dug from a little distance away, down to the charcoal fire at the bottom of the furnace. The fire, which must be kept up to the very greatest possible heat, was fed with fresh air through this tunnel by means of a goatskin bellows with a stone nozzle. After two or three hours of uninterrupted heat, there would be a lump of pig iron, and the impurities could be hammered out and the metal worked into shape on a forge.
Nkula’s father knew how to make spear heads, ax heads, knives with leaf-shaped or curved blades, and iron wire, which, when passed red-hot over buffalo horn, blackened and became nearly rust-proof. Iron wire could also be polished and used for ornaments, although the people preferred brass wire, which would not rust. Among the things which Nkunda’s mother treasured was a necklace of grayish-brown mottled nuts like pairs of little pyramids set base to base, fastened together, not by a string,but by little links of iron wire. A cross formed of the nuts made a kind of pendant, and although nobody in the village knew it, the necklace had probably been made in some coast village, for a rosary, from the nuts of a eucalyptus or “fever tree” near a mission settlement.
While the preparations for the expedition were going on, even the monkeys appeared to know that it was a busy time, and they leaped and chattered and swung from tree to tree as if they too had important affairs on hand. As the Alo Man watched them, he was reminded of the story of the Scrawny Old Man and the Scrawny Old Woman.
making a spear head
I often tell [said he] of the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman who lived in a hut in the forest. They always complained of being very poor and having hardly enough to eat, but by and by the neighbors noticed that after the two had visited at any house, something or other was always missed. Then one day a neighbor who was sick in bed awoke to see them going out of his hut with his bag of cowrie shells between them. He shouted and shouted at them, but they did not stop, and after a while some of the other neighbors heard and came running in to see who was being murdered.
“Oh, oh, oh!” wailed the poor sick man. “The scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman have been here, and they have taken all my cowries and gone away!”
The neighbors looked at one another and nodded. They told the sick man not to wail and weep any more, for they would attend to getting back his bag of cowries.
Then they went all together to the house of the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman and said, “Give us back the bag of cowries that you stole from the poor sick man, or we will beat you with whips of hippopotamus hide!”
hut in forest
But the scrawny old man and the scrawnyold woman cried and howled and said that they had not taken the bag of cowries. And when the neighbors searched the hut they did not find it.
But the neighbors still believed that the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman had taken the bag of cowries, and they said, “We will come with our whips of hippopotamus hide and you shall eat whip until you give back the cowries that you stole.”
Then while the neighbors went to fetch their whips, the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman climbed up and got the bag of cowries, which they had hidden in the thatch of the roof, and ran with it into the forest. But they were not quite quick enough. The neighbors saw them and came after them so fast with their whips of hippopotamus hide, that at last the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman had to climb into a tree.
“You shall not come down from the tree,” cried the neighbors, looking up at the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman where they squatted among the branches, “until you give back the cowries that you stole from the poor sick man.”
“We will stay in this tree until they go away,and then we will climb down and escape,” said the scrawny old man to the scrawny old woman.
The neighbors heard what he said, and they shouted, “We will stay under the tree until you come down.”
“When they go home to get their supper we will climb down and run away very fast in the dark,” said the scrawny old woman to the scrawny old man.
The neighbors heard her, and they shouted, “We will build huts under the tree and take turns watching for you to come down.”
And so they did.
Days passed, then weeks, then months. The scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman sat in the tree waiting for the neighbors to go away, and the neighbors sat under the tree waiting for them to come down. The scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman became very hungry. First they ate the fruit of the tree; then they ate the kernels; then they ate the young leaves; then they ate the old leaves; at last they stripped the bark off the branches and ate that. They grew scrawnier and scrawnier every day. Their eyes had sunk in their heads with sleeplessness. Their teeth grew long and sharp with cracking the kernelsof the fruit and gnawing the bark from the tree. They almost forgot how to talk.
One day the scrawny old man held out his scrawny old hand and said, “See how tough the skin is!” And the scrawny old woman held out her scrawny old hand and said, “My hand is just as tough as yours!”
Then they looked at their feet and saw that the skin of their feet had grown tough also; and their toe nails and finger nails had grown long, like claws, with holding on so firmly to the branches of the tree.
“It is very strange,” said the scrawny old man.
“Indeed, it is very strange,” said the scrawny old woman.
Then the new year came with its heavy rains, and the scrawny old man and scrawny old woman shivered with cold. One morning the scrawny old man said to the scrawny old woman, “This is very strange. You are all covered with hair.”
And the scrawny old woman said to the scrawny old man, “It is surely very strange, but so are you.”
It really seemed as if they were not the same persons that they were when they climbed into the tree.
Then one morning the scrawny old man said to the scrawny old woman, “I have a very strange feeling at the end of my spine.”
“So have I!” said the scrawny old woman. “What can be going to happen now?”
And behold, each had a tail just beginning to grow!
monkeys on tree branch
The Jackal says it was then that the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman began to chatter and shriek at each other as if they had lost their wits, but no one can tell whether or not they were blaming each other for the strange things that had happened to them, because from that day to this no one has been able to understand what they say. Certain it is that when they found their appearance was so completely changed, they began to leap from one branch to another and from one tree to another, and so escaped from the neighbors, who were stillat the foot of the tree, waiting for them to come down. But they let go the bag of cowries in their flight, and it fell to the ground and was picked up by the neighbors, who carried it back to the poor sick man.
And from that day to this the People of the Trees have all been little scrawny old men and old women who chase one another from tree to tree, and chatter and shriek and quarrel, and sometimes come down and steal things from the huts, but very seldom are able to keep what they have stolen. And from that day to this they have not forgotten that they once were people and lived in a village, for they build little huts in the branches for their young ones, and are always watching what the people of the village do and trying to be like them.
It is not known whether the monkey story had anything to do with it or not, but during the final preparations for the trading expedition there was no quarreling and things went on in a very orderly and businesslike fashion.
When the carriers had all come in from the other villages, there were more than a hundred all together, and last of all the medicine man made his appearance. He was a little, wizened,shrewd-looking old fellow who carried a charm bag and a wooden fetich image which nobody would have touched for anything. It must have been at least three or four hundred years old, for it was a stumpy carved statue of a Portuguese sea captain in the dress of the sixteenth century, and the wood had turned almost black with age. Nobody in Africa could possibly have seen anything like it for many generations, and naturally it was thought to be magic.
medicine man
The medicine man called all the headmen together and sat them down in a circle, he and his fetich occupying the middle. On his head was a crown of gay feathers, and his costume was made up chiefly of rattles, beads, and ornaments of magical power. He made a little speech to the fetich, asking it to give good luck to the caravan, to keep it safe from danger of water, flame, or iron, and to make it successful in its dealings. Then he sacrificed a chickento the fetich, and the chicken was solemnly cooked and eaten by the company. No one in the caravan could after that enter his house or turn back upon the road. The medicine man selected charms from those in his charm bag—herbs, spices, feathers, and little bones—and put them in a shell which he set in the middle of the trail. Then the caravan was ready to start. The long procession of traders, porters, headmen, and soldiers moved in a swinging stride down the path, each one stepping over the shell and not looking back. No one touched the shell, which was very lucky, and whether the medicine man’s ceremonies had anything to do with it or not, the expedition returned safely in due time, with a tale of good luck on the trail and success in the trading.