Word: dagwan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...time is before Columbus. A famine year is upon the forest. Baluk, the tribe's big-muscled hunter, reports to Chetoga, the old chief, that their people should go "many moccasins" north without delay to the crossing place of the caribou. Dagwan, the malicious medicine man, makes it a condition of the plan that if game is not found, Baluk must die. Dagwan's desires are the chieftainship and Chetoga's doe-eyed daughter Neewa...
...What shall be the manner of your death?" sneers Dagwan...
...flames mount. Baluk, his stoic face agonized, lays by his tom-tom and draws his robe over his head in the inferno. But then the sentinels' signal fires flare. Baluk is dragged off the pyre still alive to lead the tribe against the milling, trampling, stampeding, incredible game herd. Dagwan is sent away for "the slow death" (starvation) while the tribe feasts and laughs and toboggans. The silent enemy, Hunger, snarls his defeat from the lowering arctic storm-scud...