He accepted the offer of the chief of the bears, and lived with his wife very happily for some time.  He had by her two sons, one of whom was like an Indian, and the other like a bear.  When the bear-child was oppressed with heat, his mother would take him into the deep cool caves, while the Indian-child would shiver with cold, and cry after her in vain.  As the autumn advanced, the bears began to go out in search of acorns, and then the she-bear said to Muckwa, “Stay at home here and watch our house, while I go to gather some nuts.”  She departed and was gone for some days with her people.  By-and-by Muckwa became tired of staying at home, and thought that he would go off to a distance and resume his favorite bear-hunting.  He accordingly started off, and at last came to a grove of lofty oaks, which were full of large acorns.  He found signs of bear, and soon espied a fat she-bear on the top of a tree.  He shot at her with a good aim, and she fell, pierced by his unerring arrow.  He went up to her, and found it was his sister-in-law, who reproached him with his cruelty, and told him to return to his own people.  Muckwa returned quietly home, and pretended not to have left his lodge.  However, the old chief understood, and was disposed to kill him in revenge; but his wife found means to avert her father’s anger.  The winter season now coming on, Muckwa prepared to accompany his wife into winter quarters; they selected a large tamarack tree, which was hollow, and lived there comfortably until a party of hunters discovered their retreat.  The she-bear told Muckwa to remain quietly in the tree, and that she would decoy off the hunters.  She came out of the hollow, jumped from a bough of the tree, and escaped unharmed, although the hunters shot after her.  Some time after, she returned to the tree, and told Muckwa that he had better go back to his own people.  “Since you have lived among us,” said she, “we have nothing but ill-fortune; you have killed my sister; and now your friends have followed your footsteps to our retreats to kill us.  The Indian and the bear cannot live in the same lodge, for the Master of Life has appointed for them different habitations.”  So Muckwa returned with his son to his own people; but he never after would shoot a she-bear, for fear that he should kill his wife.”

I admire this story for the savoir faire, the nonchalance, the Vivian Greyism of Indian life.  It is also a poetical expression of the sorrows of unequal relations; those in which the Master of Life was not consulted.  Is it not pathetic; the picture of the mother carrying off the child that was like herself into the deep, cool caves, while the other, shivering with cold, cried after her in vain?  The moral, too, of Muckwa’s return to the bear lodges, thinking to hide his sin by silence, while it was at once discerned by those connected with him, is fine.

We have a nursery tale, of which children never weary, of a little boy visiting a bear house and holding intercourse with them on terms as free as Muckwa did.  So, perhaps, the child of Norman-Saxon blood, no less than the Indian, finds some pulse of the Orson in his veins.