At the edge of the Council Ring there was a teepee, larger and more elaborately embellished than the teepee at the camp entrance. That was the Council Tent, decorated at the top with bands of red, green, yellow, blue, and black, and with a border at the bottom of red and black. There was also a totem pole, whose crest was carved with the head of an eagle, and below that with a large unfurled wing jutting stiffly out to either side. The dominant colors of the totem pole were black, white, and red, the last two being the colors for the camp's color war. The totem pole stood about fifteen feet high and could be seen by anyone looking up from a boat on the lake. To the west, across the lake, where the girls were holding their own Indian Night, the sun was beginning to set, and full darkness would come by the time the Grand Council was over. Only faintly could you hear the post-dinner kitchen clatter from the dining lodge, while beyond the lake a striated sky drama, a long lava flow of burnt orange and bright pink and bloody crimson, registered the lingering end of the day. An iridescent, slow-moving summer twilight was creeping over Indian Hill, a splashy gift from the god of the horizon, if there was such a deity in the Indian pantheon.
The boys and their counselors — each designated a "brave" for the evening — arrived at Grand Council dressed in outfits that in large part came out of the crafts shop. All wore beaded headbands, fringed tunics that were originally ordinary shirts, and leggings that were trousers stitched with fringe at the outside seam. On their feet they wore moccasins, some cut from leather in the crafts shop and a good many of which were high-top sneakers that had been wrapped like moccasins at the ankle with bead and fringe. A number of the boys had feathers in their headbands — dropped bird plumage that they'd found in the woods — some wore beaded armbands tied inches above the elbow, and many carried canoe paddles that were painted with symbols colored, like the totem pole, in red, black, and white. Others had bows borrowed from the archery shack slung over their shoulders — bows without the arrows — and a few carried simulated tom-toms of tightly drawn calfskin and drum beaters with beaded handles that they made in crafts. Several held in their hands rattles that were decorated baking-powder cans filled with pebbles. The youngest campers used their own bed blankets wrapped around them as Indian robes, which also served to keep them warm as the evening temperature dropped.
Bucky's Indian outfit had been gathered together for him by the crafts counselor. Like the faces of the others, his had been darkened with cocoa powder to simulate an Indian's skin tone, and he had two diagonal stripes — "war paint" — applied to either cheek, one of black drawn with charcoal and the other of red drawn with lipstick. He sat next to Donald Kaplow and with the rest of the Comanche boys, who were seated farther down along the bench. Everywhere the boys loudly talked and joked until two campers carrying calfskin drums got up from the benches and walked to the stone surround of the campfire logs and, facing each other, began to solemnly bang on the drums while those carrying rattles shook them, no two in the same rhythm.
Then everyone turned to look toward the teepee. Mr. Blomback emerged from the oval doorway in a feather headdress, white feathers with brown tips all around his head and trailing behind in a tail down to below his waist. His tunic, his leggings, even his moccasins were elaborately decorated with leather fringe and bands of beadwork and long tufts of what looked like human hair but was probably a woman's hairpiece from the five-and-ten. In one hand he carried a club — "Great Chief Blomback's war club," Donald whispered — that was replete with feathers, and in the other hand a peace pipe, consisting of a long wooden stem ending in a clay bowl and strung along the stem with still more feathers.
All the campers stood until Mr. Blomback stolidly made his way from the teepee to the center of the Council Ring. The drumming and the rattling stopped, and the campers took their seats.
Mr. Blomback handed his war club and peace pipe to the two drummers and, dramatically folding his arms over his chest, looked around at all the campers on the encircling benches. His heavy application of cocoa powder did not altogether cover his prominent Adam's apple, but otherwise he looked astonishingly like a real chief. In years gone by he had saluted the braves Indian fashion — using an upraised right arm with the palm forward — and they would collectively return the salute, simultaneously grunting "Ugh!" But this greeting had to be abandoned with the arrival on the world scene of the Nazis, who employed that salute to signify "Heil Hitler!"
"When first the brutal anthropoid stood up and walked erect," Mr. Blomback began, " — there was man! The great event was symbolized and marked by the lighting of the first campfire."
Donald turned to Bucky and whispered, "We get this every week. The little kids don't understand a word. No worse, I guess, than what happens in shul."
"For millions of years," Mr. Blomback continued, "our race has seen in this blessed fire the means and emblem of light, warmth, protection, friendly gathering, council."
He paused as the roar of an airplane engine passed over the camp. This happened now round the clock. An army air corps base had opened at the beginning of the war some seventy miles to the north, and Indian Hill was on its flyway.
"All the hallow of the ancient thoughts," Mr. Blomback said, "of hearth, fireside, home, is centered on its glow, and the home tie itself is weakened with the waning of the home fire. Only the ancient sacred fire of wood has power to touch and thrill the chords of primitive remembrance. Your campfire partner wins your love, and having camped in peace together — having marveled together at the morning sun, the evening light, the stars, the moon, the storms, the sunset, the dark of night — yours is a lasting bond of union, however wide your worlds may be apart."
Unfolding his two fringed arms, he extended them toward the assembly, and in unison the campers retorted to the stream of grandiloquence: "The campfire is the focal center of all primitive brotherhood. We shall not fail to use its magic."
The drummers now took up their tom-tom beat, and Donald whispered to Bucky, "An Indian historian. Somebody Seton. That's his god. Those are his words. Mr. Blomback uses the same Indian name as Seton: Black Wolf. He doesn't think any of this is nonsense."
Next a figure wearing the mask of a big-beaked bird stood in the front row and approached the ready-laid fire. He bowed his head to Mr. Blomback and then addressed the campers.
"Meetah Kola nayhoon-po omnicheeyay nee-chopi."
"It's our medicine man," whispered Donald. "It's Barry Feinberg."
"Hear me, my friends," the medicine man continued, translating his Indian sentence into English. "We are about to hold a council."
A boy stepped forward from the first row carrying several pieces of wood in his hand, one shaped like a bow, another a stick about a foot long with a sharpened end, and several smaller pieces. He set them on the ground near the medicine man.
"Now light we the council fire," the medicine man said, "after the manner of the forest children, not in the way of the white man, but — even as Wa-konda himself doth light his fire — by the rubbing together of two trees in the storm, so cometh forth the sacred fire from the wood of the forest."
The medicine man knelt, and many of the campers stood to watch as he used the bow and the long, pointed drill and the other odd bits of wood to attempt to ignite a fire.