A frosty morning he said it was, and he was out in the mountain
a-hunting. He repeated the song which he had been singing, and the wind
as it swirled about the house must have caught his voice and carried it
far. It was a song chronicling the deeds of the Great Bear, and had a
meaningless refrain, "_Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah! Eeon-a, Ha-hoo-jah!"_ But
when he reached the advent upon the scene of the secondary hero, the
Great Bear himself, very polite, speaking excellent Cherokee ("since we
are alone," he said), very recognizant of the merits of Amoyah,--the
fame of which indeed was represented to have resounded through the
remotest seclusions of the ursine realm,--fiction though it all
obviously was, the man of facts could no longer endure this
magnification of his rival.

"The great Eeon-a said all that to you?" he sneered. "The fire-water at
the trading-house makes your heart very strong and your tongue crooked.
This sounds to me like the language of a simple seequa, not the Great
Bear--a mere bit of an opossum!"

Amoyah paused with a sudden gasp. He was not without an aggressive
temper, albeit, persuaded of his own perfection, he feared no rival, and
least of all Tus-ka-sah.

"You, Tus-ka-sah," he retorted angrily, "have evidently strongly shaken
hands with the discourse of the opossum, speaking its language like the
animal itself, and also the wolfish English. You have too many tongues,
and, more than all, the deceitful, forked tongue of the snake, which is
not agreeable to the old beloved speech. For myself, the Great Bear made
me welcome in the only language that does not make my heart weigh
heavy,--the elegant Cherokee language."