TWO LAZY HUNTERS

TWO LAZY HUNTERS

A party of warriors once started out for a long hunting trip in the mountains.
They went on until they came to a good game region, when they set up their bark
hut in a convenient place near the river side. Every morning after breakfast they
scattered out, each man for himself, to be gone all day, until they returned at
night with whatever game they had taken. There was one lazy fellow who went
out alone every morning like the others, but only until he found a sunny slope,
when he would stretch out the side of a rock to sleep until evening, returning
then to camp empty-handed, but with his moccasins torn and a long story of how
he had tramped all day and found nothing. This went on until one of the others
began to suspect that something was wrong, and made it his business to find it
out. The next morning he followed him secretly through the woods until he saw
him come out into a sunny opening, where he sat down upon a large rock, took
off his moccasins, and began rubbing them against the rocks until he had worn
holes in them. Then the lazy fellow loosened his belt, lay down beside the rock,
and went to sleep. The spy set fire to the dry leaves and watched until the flame
crept close up to the sleeping man, who never opened his eyes.
The spy went back to camp and told what he had seen. About supper time the
lazy fellow came in with the same old story of a long day’s hunt and no game
started. When he had finished the others all laughed and called him a
sleepyhead. He insisted that he had been climbing the ridges all day, and put out
his moccasins to show how worn they were, not knowing that they were
scorched from the fire, as he had slept on until sundown. When they saw the
blackened moccasins they laughed again, and he was too much astonished to say
a word in his defense; so the captain said that such a liar was not fit to stay with
them, and he was driven from the camp.There was another lazy fellow who courted a pretty girl, but she would have
nothing to do with him, telling him that her husband must be a good hunter or
she would remain single all her life. One morning he went into the woods, and
a lucky accident managed to kill a deer. Lifting it upon his back, he carried it
into the settlement, passing right the door of the house where the girl and her
mother lived. As soon as he was out of sight of the house he went a
roundabout course into the woods again and waited until evening, when he
appeared with the deer on his shoulder and came down the trail past the girl’s
house as he had in the morning. He did this the next day, and the next, until the
girl began to think he must be killing all the deer in the woods. So her mother—
the old women are usually the matchmakers—got ready and went to the young
man’s mother to talk it over.
When she arrived and the greetings were done she said, “Your son must be a
good hunter.” “No,” replied the old woman, “he seldom kills anything.” “But he
has been killing a great many deer lately.” “I haven’t seen any,” said his mother.
“Why, he has been carrying deer past our house twice a day for the last three
days.” “I don’t know what he did with them,” said the young man’s mother; “he
never brought them here.” Then the girl’s mother was sure there was something
wrong, so she went home and told her husband, who followed up the young
man’s trail into the woods until it brought him to where the body of the deer was
hidden, now so far decayed that it had to be thrown away.