24 
MUSEUM BULLETIN NO. 16. 
to the council in order to conspire against you, but my husband 
and myself were not invited, and that is why I am telling you 
this. Furthermore, at the sand-bar south of the lake is a place 
where some of the water-spirits go to bask in the sun on nice 
days.' ‘Grandmother, it is good,’ said Holy One, and he took 
the paint which was red and painted the woodpecker’s face and 
then took his awl and placed it in her bill. Thereupon she flew 
away to a hardwood tree and pecked into it, sending her bill 
clear through. She felt very proud of her new bill.” 
The disguise of Holy One and the wounding of the 
water-spirits follows, then the meeting with the old woman 
then the various incidents of which she has spoken, and finally 
Holy One’s attempt to restore his brother to life. The motiva- 
tion of the search and the incidents connected with the water- 
spirits’ pursuit of Holy One occupies fully one-half of the entire 
tale. The incident of the death of the brother and the attempt 
to restore him to life have become dwarfed. The type of plot 
elaboration demanded first a heaping up of incidents to be fore- 
told and then their actual occurrence, and this naturally crowded 
out other things. In both versions of the Haxige tale 1 (12) the 
episode of the buzzard hurrying to cure the wounded water- 
spirits is strongly stressed and he tells Haxige all that the latter 
desires to know about the whereabouts of the wounded animals 
and how to approach them, but the pursuit of Haxige, after he 
has killed the water-spirits, is dismissed in the following manner. 
“They went homeward to attack him. When they had 
come very close to their home, Haxige went rushing homeward, 
carrying his brother on his arm. . . . But though they 
became all kinds of animals, they did not overtake Haxige and 
his brother. ‘There is cause for anger! Make ye an effort. 
You will be apt to fail,’ said they. They went along after him. 
It happened that Haxige, when on his way home, drew near a 
spring which boiled up repeatedly. It was a very dense forest 
at the foot of a cliff, a very high hill, whose perpendicular sur- 
face was concave. ‘Do ye make an effort. You have almost 
overtaken him,’ said they. At length Haxige became a bullet. 
1 J. O. Dorsey, ibid., pp. 226-253. 
