Donald whispered to Bucky, "This can take a while."
"Can it even be done?" Bucky whispered back.
"Chief Black Wolf can do it in thirty-one seconds. For the campers it's harder. They sometimes have to give in and do it in the way of the helpless white man, by striking a match."
Some of the campers were standing on their benches to get a better look. After a few minutes, Mr. Blomback sidled over to the medicine man and, gesturing as he spoke, quietly gave him some tips.
Everyone waited several minutes more before a whoop went up from the campers, as first there was smoke and then a spark, which when blown upon, ignited a small flame in the tinder of dry pine needles and birch bark shavings. The tinder in turn ignited the kindling at the base of the logs, and the campers chanted in unison, "Fire, fire, fire, burn! Flames, flames, flames, turn! Smoke, smoke, smoke, rise!"
Then, with the mournful loud-soft-soft-soft beat of the two tom-toms, the dancing began: the Mohawks did the snake dance, the Senecas the caribou dance, the Oneidas the dog dance, the Hopis the corn dance, the Sioux the grass dance. In one dance the braves jumped strenuously about with their heads high in the air, in another they did a skipping step on the balls of their feet with a double hop on each foot, in a third they carried deer antlers before them, made of crooked tree limbs bound together. Sometimes they howled like wolves and sometimes they yapped like dogs, and in the end, when it was fully dark and the burning fire alone lit the Council Ring, twenty of the campers, each armed with a war club and wearing necklaces of beads and claws, set out by the light of the fire to hunt Mishi-Mokwa, the Big Bear. Mishi-Mokwa was impersonated by the largest boy in camp, Jerome Hochberger, who slept across the aisle from Bucky. Jerome was wrapped in somebody's mother's old fur coat that he'd pulled up over his head.
"I am fearless Mishi-Mokwa," Jerome growled from within the coat. "I, the mighty mountain grizzly, king of all the western prairies."
The hunters had a leader who was also from Bucky's cabin, Shelly Schreiber. With the drums beating loudly behind him and light from the fire flashing on his painted face, Shelly said, "These are all my chosen warriors. We go hunting Mishi-Mokwa, he the Big Bear of the mountains, he that ravages our borders. We will surely seek and slay him."
Here a lot of the little kids began to call, "Slay him! Slay him! Slay Mishi-Mokwa!"
The hunters gave a war whoop, dancing as though they were bears on their hind legs. Then they set out looking for the trail of the Big Bear by conspicuously smelling the ground. When they reached him, he rose with a loud snarl, eliciting screams of fright from the small boys on the nearby benches.
"Ho, Mishi-Mokwa," said the leader of the hunters, "we have found you. If you do not come before I count to a hundred, I will brand you a coward wherever I go."
Suddenly, the bear sprang up at them, and as the campers cheered, the hunters proceeded to club him senseless with war clubs of straw wrapped in burlap. When he was stretched across the ground in the fur coat, the hunters danced around Mishi-Mokwa, each in turn grasping his lifeless paw and shouting, "How! How! How!" The campers' cheering continued, the delight enormous at finding themselves encompassed by murder and death.
Next, two counselors, a small one and a tall one, identified as Short Feather and Long Feather, told a series of animal tales that made the younger children scream with feigned horror, and then Mr. Blomback, having removed his feather headdress and set it down alongside his peace pipe and war club, led the boys in singing familiar camp songs for some twenty minutes, thus bringing them down to earth from the excitement of playing Indian. This was followed by his saying, "And here's the important war news from last week. Here's what's been happening beyond Indian Hill. In Italy, the British army broke across the Arno River into Florence. In the Pacific, United States assault forces invaded Guam, and Tojo —"
"Boo! Boo, Tojo!" a group of older boys called out.
"Tojo, the premier of Japan," Mr. Blomback resumed, "was ousted as chief of the Japanese army staff. In England, Prime Minister Churchill —"
"Yay, Churchill!"
"— predicted that the war against Germany could come to end earlier than expected. And right here in Chicago, Illinois, as many of you know by now, President Roosevelt was nominated for a fourth term by the Democratic National Convention."
Here a good half of the campers came to their feet, shouting, "Hurray! Hurray, President Roosevelt!" while somebody beat wildly on one of the tom-toms and somebody else shook a rattle.
"And now," said Mr. Blomback when it was quiet again, "bearing in mind the American troops fighting in Europe and the Pacific, and bearing in mind all of you boys who, like me, have relatives in the service, the next-to-last song to end the campfire will be 'God Bless America.' We dedicate it to all of those who are overseas tonight, fighting for our country."
After they had stood to sing "God Bless America," the boys raised their arms in their fringed sleeves, draped them around one another's shoulders, and, with one row of campers swaying in one direction and the rows of campers in front and behind swaying in the other, they sang "Till We Meet Again," the anthem of comradery that calmly brought to a close every Indian Night. When it was sung for the last Indian Night of the season, many of the homebound campers would wind up in tears.
Meanwhile, Bucky alone had been brought to tears by the singing of "God Bless America" and the memory of the great college friend who had not been out of his thoughts since he'd learned of his death fighting in France. Bucky had done his best throughout the ceremonies to attend to what was going on around the fire as well as to listen to Donald quietly kibitzing beside him, but all he could really think about was Jake's death and Jake's life, about all that might have become of him had he lived. While the boys were hunting down the Big Bear, Bucky had been remembering the statewide college meet in the spring of '41 when Jake had set not just a Panzer College record but a U.S. collegiate record by throwing the shot fifty-six feet three inches. How did he do it, a reporter from the Newark Star-Ledger had asked him. Grinning widely — and flashing at Bucky his trophy with the tiny bronze shot-putter perched atop it, frozen at the point of the shot's release — Jake told him. "Easy," he said with a wink. "The left shoulder is high, the right shoulder is higher, the right elbow is even higher, and the right hand is the highest. There's the scheme. Follow that, and the shot takes care of itself." Easy. Everything for Jake was easy. He would surely have gone on to throw in the Olympics, would have gone on to marry Eileen as soon as he got home, would have garnered a job in college coaching… With all that talent, what could have stopped him?
After the singing of the farewell song, the campers buddied up in pairs and followed their counselors down from the benches around the dying campfire, which a couple of junior counselors stayed behind to extinguish. As they headed back to their cabins with their twinkling flashlights disappearing into the dark woods, an occasional war whoop went up from the departing boys, and some of the blanketed little ones, still under the spell of the blazing fire, could be heard gleefully shouting "How! How! How!" A few, by shining their flashlights upward from their chins while grimacing and widening their eyes, made monster faces to scare each other one last time before Indian Night was over. For close to an hour the voices of laughing and giggling children could be heard reverberating from cabin to cabin, and, even after everyone was asleep, the smell of wood smoke permeated the camp.