While walking on the edge of a precipice he
slipped--and away he slid, far down the rocky side. When he reached the
bottom, he looked back, and there, on the rock, on which he had slid down,
he saw things which he had never seen before.
"'My nephews,' said Nanahboozhoo, 'when they see these things on the rocks,
will call them Wau-konug (lichen), and although they are poor food they
will keep them from starving when they have nothing better.'
"This is the Indian tradition of the origin of the patches of lichen
attached to the bare rocks. The Indians still call them 'no-scabs,' and
when boiled they make a kind of jelly food which is a little better than
starvation.
"Then Nanahboozhoo, although his back was bleeding from his sliding down
the rough rocks, continued walking, sometimes along the shore and sometimes
in the thick bush. In one place where the thicket was very dense such was
his magic power that he pulled a lot of the thickets together and walked
over on their tops. When he looked back he saw that the blood from the
wounds in his back had given a red color to the bushes over which he had
walked. Then said Nanahboozhoo:
"'My nephews will call these bushes "Me-squah-be-me-sheen" (red willows).
They will use them to stop bleeding when they meet with any severe
accidents;' and such the Indians still do when they live among them.
"This is the tradition as to the origin of the red willow, once so common
in many of the Indian haunts.
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