A peculiar stillness reigned.  Not a breeze stirred, the sun was blazing hot, notwithstanding the long, trailing clouds that traversed the sky.

“Kuawk, kuawk, kuawk!” sounded the cries of several crows, as they flew from a neighbouring tree.  They went in the very direction where Topanashka suspected the Tehua to be, and alighted on a pinon in that neighbourhood.  The old man glanced, not at the birds, but at the trunk above which the crows were sitting.  It was not thick enough to conceal the body of a man, and about it the ground was bare.  If there had been anybody hiding there, the cunning and mistrustful birds would never have alighted.  The maseua took this into consideration, and began to doubt the correctness of his former conclusions.  Yet it was wiser not to attempt a close examination of the sandal; such curiosity might still lead to fatal results.

Like an old fox, Topanashka determined to circumvent the dangerous spot, by describing a wide arc around it.  He would thus meet the trail farther north, and be able to judge from signs there whether or not the Tehua was close upon the Rito.  First he would have to crawl backward until he was at a sufficient distance to be out of sight altogether.

This movement he began to execute in his usual slow and deliberate manner, crawfishing until he felt sure that he could not be seen from the point where the crows had taken their position.  Once during his retreat the birds fluttered upward, croaking, but alighted again on the same spot.  Something must have disturbed them.

Topanashka arose, straightened himself, and moved ahead as noiselessly as possible.  He maintained a course parallel to the trail.

The old man considered himself now as being in the country of the enemy and on hostile ground.  For whereas he was in reality not far from the Rito, still, possibly, he had an enemy in his rear.  It is the custom of a warrior of high rank in the esoteric cluster of the war magicians, ere the trailing of an enemy begins, to pronounce a short prayer, and Topanashka had neglected it.  His indignation at the discovery of Shotaye’s misdeed was the cause of this neglect.  Now it came to his mind.

“Kuawk, kuawk, kuawk!”

A crow flew overhead.  It came from the tree where the others had been sitting, or at least from that direction.

To the Indian the crow is a bird of ill omen.  Its discordant voice is, next to the cry of the owl, regarded as the most dismal forewarning.  The use of its plumage in magic is strongly condemned.  Was it not strange that those harbingers of misfortune so persistently followed him, and that their repulsive croaking always interrupted his thoughts?  Topanashka resolved to make good on the spot what he had omitted, and ere he moved, to pray.