Atondido Stories
canoe and sailed towards the east, and as he pushed off from the
beach the little white birds left him and disappeared in the air.
The sea was now calm and there was no storm, as there had been
on his outward journey. Soon he reached the shore on the other
side. He left his canoe in the cove as the old man had told him,
and in a few days he arrived at his home, still bearing the Shad-
ow from the Country of Silence.
He worked hard for many years but he did no evil, and in
the end he became a great Chief and did much good for his peo-
ple. He ruled wisely and justly and well, as his sister had com-
manded him. Then one day, when he was old and his work was
done, he disappeared, and his people knew that he had gone to
join his sister in the Land of Shadows in the Country of Silence
far away somewhere in the West. But he left behind him the
Shadow his sister had given him; and while there is Light the In-
dians still have their Shadow and no harm can come to them, for
where there is Light there can be no evil.
But always in the late autumn the Shadows of the Indian
brother and sister in the Country of Silence are lonely for their
former life. And they think of their living friends and of the plac-
es of their youth, and they wish once more to follow the hunt,
for they know that the hunter's moon is shining. And when their
memory dwells with longing on their earlier days, their spirits
are allowed to come back to earth for a brief season from the
Land of Shadows. Then the winds are silent and the days are
very still, and the smoke of their camp fires appears like haze
upon the air. And men call this season Indian Summer, but it is
really but a Shadow of the golden summer that has gone. And it
always is a reminder to the Indians that in the Land of Shadows,
far away in the Country of Silence in the West, there are no dead.
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