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I WENT the last bit of the way on my hands and knees; and when at last, I half-raised up and looked out through the brush, that which I saw made my heart beat fast: right there in front of me was a big, a very big, old grizzly bear standing on her hind legs in the water, forepaws half-raised, and with quick turns of the head watching the surface of the stream close around her. On the shore sat two very little bears watching her.
Suddenly, right at her back, a beaver stuck its head out of the water for a breath of air and as quickly sank. She whirled, jumping high in the air, and came down on all four feet, and pawed around in the muddied water. The claws of her right paw caught in my trap chain; she pulled, and brought to the surface the trap and the fine, big beaver in it. She made a lunge and gripped the round, fat body in her mouth and started ashore.
That made me mad. Also, I was terribly afraid of the big animal: she was of the kind that often killed people just for the fun of crushing their flesh and bones and leaving the body for relatives to find and cry over. But I was as angry as I was afraid. I didn't want to lose that trap, with several horses; nor the fine beaver, worth at least a good pack-animal.
For the very first time I called upon my medicine dream: "Hai-yu! You four ancient brothers, help me," I prayed, and made ready to shoot. The old she sticky-mouth was coming ashore; her two young ones were now standing on their hind legs, watching her, trying with their black, little noses to know what it was that she carried in her mouth. I had staked the trap chain its full length from the shore, so that the beaver could not go out on the land and free itself by gnawing off its leg. I intended that it should drown; no doubt it had just got into the trap and was struggling to keep its head above the water as the bear came along.
And now the chain suddenly straightened; the stake held, and the beaver and the dangling trap dropped from the bear's mouth. She gave a low growl of surprise and anger and turned to seize the animal again.
She was broadside to me; this was my chance; I aimed close back of her shoulder, and well from the back, and fired. The gun boomed; the bear gave a terrible roar of pain and anger; I sprang to my feet, whirled to run, and knocked my sister down. I had not known that she was right behind me. Of course, she yelled, and the bear heard her. I grasped her arm and helped her up. "Run! Run fast!" I told her, as I looked back toward the river. Roaring loudly, and smashing down the big brush at every jump, the bear was coming for us. Red blood was streaming from her big, wide-open mouth; and when I saw that I felt that there was a chance for us to escape her: that light red, frothy blood comes only from pierced lungs. That was where my ball had struck in: there would soon be neither breath nor blood in her body.
Nitaki was running straight for the horses; running so fast that the two braids of her hair swung straight out from her head. I kept right behind her; but run as we would the bear was gaining upon us.
Again White Wolf’s words came to me: "Fight hard for your mother and sister. "And at that I turned off considerably to the left for a few steps, slowing up and shouting at the bear. She almost at once changed her course to follow me, never noticing Nitaki, and then I went on as fast as I could. But the bear was now very close to me and getting closer. I dropped my gun, tore off my belt, and then, snatching my, blanket from around my shoulders, I made a ball of it and tossed it backward over my head. The bear caught it, stopped to bite and claw it, and I went on for three or four jumps, to a young cottonwood, and up it to the first branches almost as fast as a squirrel could have climbed.
I looked back, the bear had left the blanket and was coming on, wheezing loudly, and all covered with foamy blood; and she was coming about as fast as ever, but suddenly, as she jumped, she died: died in the air. When her big body struck the ground it lay still, and I gave a shout of victory.
Down I dropped from the tree and called my sister: "Come, Nitaki," I yelled, "sticky-mouth is dead."
"Are you sure of it?" she shouted back.
"Yes, sure. Come on!" I answered.
Together we stood and looked at the big animal, almost as big as a cow buffalo. What a huge, wide head it had! What very small, mean eyes, and what very long claws on its fore feet! They were as long as my hand.
They were mine. I might not take the hide, none but medicine men dared take a bear's hide, and they only a strip of it from the back with which to wrap a sacred pipe. Why? Because bears are people, different from us but a very little in form.
But I had a right to the claws, just as one has a right to the scalp of the enemy he kills. I could wear them as a necklace, as proof that I had counted a coup. One after the other I lifted the big, fore paws and cut off the claws, Nitaki meantime getting my torn and bloody blanket in which to pack them. We then recovered my gun and I loaded it.
We went out to the river shore. The little bears were gone, and we never did see them again. I waded out in the stream and pulled up the stake, my trap, and then the chain, and the trap with the beaver in it. The bear's jaws had crushed the body but the skin was not torn and we soon had it off and the trap reset.
That was the only beaver we got that morning; the next trap was sprung, the third one untouched. I reset them, and we went home, on the way rounding up our horses. Our mother was watching for us, and when we had driven the herd close in front of the lodge she got my father outside.
"See what your son has done while you were away," she told him. "Those are his horses — all but the three Short Bow gave you."
"No! Oh, no! That can't be so!" my father exclaimed.
"But it is so," Nitaki told him. "Brother trapped beavers and traded the skins for them. And we helped him. We went almost every day with him and did most of the skinning."
My father said never a word. He sat down, leaned back against the lodge skin, and stared and stared at the horses.
Sister and I dismounted. "And there," she said, throwing down the beaver-skin, "is another skin —another horse."
I was untying my blanket bundle. I opened it and laid it on the ground in front of my father. "See! I have killed a big sticky-mouth. I have counted a coup. There are the claws. Just see how very big and long they are."
Now, wouldn't you think that he would have been glad with us — that he would have laughed, and said something nice? He did nothing of the kind: he just glanced at the claws, and turned away his head, and muttered: "Everybody has good luck but me. Everything goes wrong with me. I am very poor."
"Oh, no, you are not poor, father, those horses are your horses—" I began. But my mother stopped me.
She was angry. I could see by the look of her eyes that she was very angry. "And if you are poor, unlucky, whose fault is it?" she cried. "Yours! Oh, let us go back to our people before worse luck comes to us!"
"Never! We will never go back!" my father told her; and for one so sick and weak he arose very quickly. And then he spoke more kindly: "Woman mine, and you, my children, listen!" he said. "Good luck must come to us. I shall soon be well and strong, and then I will go again after my horses and the Thunder Pipe, and next time I shall get them. Meantime, we have a good medicine, a powerful medicine: we have the ice-rock takes-fire-from-the-sun. Had I not forgotten to take it with me, I doubt that I should have returned to you well and strong, and with all that I went after."
And with that he went back into the lodge, my mother helping him, and lay down on his couch.
The days passed. I continued trapping, and now we saved the skins I got for trade with Ki-pah; we had by this time many more horses than we could use. Sleeping much and eating plenty, my father soon began to look like himself again. Only on rainy days did his snake-bitten arm pain him much.
On the day that the camp-crier made the rounds of the lodge, shouting that all the people should be ready to start the next morning for the white man's fort at the mouth of the Marias, he said that he was well enough to stand the two days' ride.
We arrived at the place without adventure, and set up our lodges close to the Big River and above and below Ki-pah's fort. He was very glad to see us. He feasted the Gros Ventres chiefs and my father, and made them fine presents. My mother and Sah-kwi-ah-ki, here, had become great friends; they were together about all the time.
When the Gros Ventres crowded into the trade-room of the fort, — all that could get in, — the great variety of rich trade goods they saw there astonished them. They almost fought with one another in their haste to get to the counters and exchange their beaver-skins for the various things that they fancied. There must have been all of twenty hundred beaver-skins in the camp, and in the course of four or five days Ki-pah had them all and his trade-room was bare of goods. But more soon came: three deep-loaded keel-boats from the fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone brought more things than Ki-pah had had in the first place before the trade began. Also, some of these things were so beautiful that just the sight of them, as they lay piled on the shelves, hurt one's eyes. Blankets there were, of many bright colors; very different from the white, and the blankets of the Red Coat traders of the North. Every man and woman in the camp wanted one, and in the whole camp there was not a beaver-skin left. The chiefs counseled together, trying to decide upon the best place to go for more beavers.
With the three keel-boats there came a great white chief, with his men, to visit Ki-pah. He was, Ki-pah told us, a different kind of white man, from a country on the other side of a great lake of salt water, and was very rich and very wise. He was always asking questions about us and our country. Not a living thing was too big or too small for him to kill and prepare for carrying with him to his far home. He took the skins, and all the bones, of buffaloes and bears and elk and antelopes, and all other animals, big and little.
One day, when my father and Short Bow and I were sitting with him in his room, he caught a spider and fastened it to a piece of paper with a pin through its body. He then set it under a queer kind of a sees-far instrument with which to see things close, and told us to look through it at the spider's head. We did so, one by one, and what we saw made us shiver. Why, that spider's head was a horrible-looking thing. It had wicked eyes and a mouth that could seize and rend prey apparently the size of a buffalo.
After we had looked at the spider, he set a drop of water under the instrument and had us look at that. It was full of wiggling worms— another horrible sight. He told us that all water was full of them. Of course we couldn't believe that: he was great medicine, that white man; he had put those wigglers into the water just to show us what power he had.
Well, the chiefs decided that we should go back to the Little River and begin trapping just above our old camp-site there. The camp-crier gave us the order early in the morning, to get ready to move the next day. But he had no sooner finished his round than he came riding again among the lodges shouting: "We shall not break camp tomorrow. The Pikuni are coming. Our friends are even now close here."
It was Short Bow's woman who came hurrying into our lodge to tell us what he said.
My father's face turned all mad-looking when he heard the news, and we dared not show our joy before him. "If they come and set up their lodges right beside us, we shall move away at once," he told my mother.
She did not answer him. Nitaki and I hurried outside to watch for the coming of our people.
Our mother soon joined us. We saw Short Bow and all the under-chiefs, the great warriors and medicine men of the Gros Ventres, ride out to meet them. And in the lodge at my back my father sat thinking hateful thoughts of our own blood people. His actions made me very sad. I saw tears in my mother's eyes. I wanted to go inside and tell him that I did not think it fair for him so to spoil our lives. I dared not do it.
Short Bow and his men soon came riding slowly back, and with them was Lone Walker, and many other great men of the Pikuni. None of them noticed us as they dismounted and went into Short Bow's lodge to feast and smoke.
We kept our eyes upon the upper end of the bottom and presently saw the head of the long column of the Pikuni come out of the timber, halt in the open grass-land beside the river, and prepare to make camp. We hurried up there. On all sides people gave us hearty greetings. We went on and found our relatives: Fox Eyes and White Wolf, and all their women and children. Then what greetings there were; happy words and tears as well. Women and girls always cry when they are most happy.
While the women hurried to put up the lodge and get water and wood and start cooking, Fox Eyes and White Wolf and a number of other men had me sit with them on the river-bank and tell them all that had happened to us since we had left the tribe. Silently they passed the pipe, listening carefully to all I said, and not one thing did they say until I told about killing the bear, and raised the necklace on my breast to show them its big claws.
An old man clapped his hands together then, and cried out: "Ha! A true Pikunikwan is this boy! A boy, say I? Why, he is a man, a warrior."
"You speak truth;" "True are your words, ancient one," the others exclaimed, and oh, how good was their praise in my ears!
When I came to the end of my talk, no one spoke for some time.
Finally White Wolf spoke up: "I am very much ashamed for my elder brother," he said. "I know that I should be very angry at him for all that he has done, most of all for taking his woman and children into all kinds of danger. But if I do say it, he is a good man, a brave man. Also, he is too proud. I say this: let us have pity for him. It is plain enough that the gods have forsaken him. He has lost his medicine, he has lost his horses, he has been snake-bitten. He is very, very poor. Let us all be very friendly to him and do what we can to get him to come back to us."
Every man there quickly cried out that he would do all he could toward that end, and the little gathering broke up. My mother and sister and I soon went home.
My father was cross with us. "Of course, you have all been up in the camp of the Pikuni — you would rather be there than with me," he said.
"Don't talk that way," my mother told him; "you know that we always want to be with you."
He did not say anything to that.
Visitors soon began coming to our lodge: White Wolf and Fox Eyes, first, to stay with us all day; and many others, friends of my father, men who had been with him on countless dangerous raids, who had fought beside him in many a battle. One and all they gave him most friendly greeting, gave what news they had, smoked a pipe or two, and went their way, each one telling him to return soon the visit.
Never had I seen my father act as he did that day. For the first time in his life he let others do the talking; had nothing to say for himself; showed by his every action that he was ashamed before them because his riches and his medicine had gone as surely from him as had the winter ice from the river flowing past our lodge.
White Wolf and Fox Eyes remained with us long after all the other visitors had gone, talking about everything except that which was always in their mind to ask. On that day they said not one word about wanting us all to go back to our place with the tribe.
In the evening, after they had gone, came a young man messenger from Lone Walker. The great chief wanted his old friend, Lone Bull, to come to his lodge and feast and smoke with him. My father quickly sat up when he heard that, and looked around for his robe and drew it to him. We thought that he accepted the call; our hearts beat fast with gladness; I could see my mother's eyes shining with joy. And then, suddenly, he tossed the robe from him, sank back against his back rest, and said to the messenger: "Tell your chief that I am a sick man and can go nowhere."
Oh, how disappointed we were!
The next morning the chief came to our lodge and remained a long time. He acted in every way as though we were still with him, as though we had never parted from the tribe. His talk was mostly of old days; days of his and my father's youth, of their many good times together. And my father, listening, remembering, forgot for the time his anger and his losses, and before the chief left, himself did no little talking about old times. We thought it a good sign; a sign that his heart was changing; a sign that we should soon be setting up our lodge with those of our people.
Day after day and all day long the Pikuni crowded into Ki-pah's fort to trade their beaver-skins for his goods. They took all the different things that had been brought up in the three boats, and called for more. What a great thing it was for us, we all said, that a white trader had settled right in the middle of our hunting-ground for the purpose of supplying all our needs.
My son, what a mistake we made. I do not blame Ki-pah. Ours was the fault. We had no real need for anything that the traders brought into our country. Making their own weapons, killing their own food, making their own clothing, our ancestors had ever lived happily, contentedly. So should we have done; so we should have done had we been wise. With the coming of the traders began our end. For them we slaughtered our game; for their bright-colored blankets, their beads and tobacco, guns and firewater gave them a foothold in our country; gave them more and more until we gave our very lands. And so, by doing that, draws near our end, and the end for all the prairie peoples.
I do not remember how many days the Pikuni and the Gros Ventres camped side by side there at the mouth of the Marias. They were happy days; days of much visiting, much feasting and dancing, horse-racing, and at-marks-shooting with the guns obtained from the trader.
"You should save your balls for the enemy," an old man cautioned.
The shooters laughed at him. What were a few balls, a hundred balls? they wanted to know. A beaver-skin would buy twenty balls, and the streams were full of beavers.
At last Lone Walker and Short Bow counseled together and decided that it was time for the two tribes to part. All the dry wood in the bottoms had been gathered and used. Continuous hunting had driven the game herd far out on the plains. Everybody wanted to trap more beavers, and good trapping could not be done if the tribes camped together up and down the streams. Each chief had his camp-crier give out word that a move would be made the next morning, the Gros Ventres returning to the Little River, the Pikuni going south to the streams of the Belt Mountains.
Also Lone Walker and Short Bow talked together about my father. Both of them were his true friends. In the evening they came into our lodge, they, and White Wolf and Fox Eyes, and many others. Lone Walker, speaking for all of them, asked him to take back his words and return to his own people.
When he had finished speaking, Short Bow also urged him to do this.
"What? Do my ears hear right?" my father cried out. "Didn't you tell me that your lodge is my lodge, your people my people?"
"I did say so; I still say so," Short Bow answered. "I am your friend; and as a friend I advise you to return to your people. You can see for yourself that that is the thing to do, because ever since you left them, you have had bad luck. The gods seem to be against you."
"It just happened so. True, I lost my Thunder Pipe, but I doubt not that my raid against the Assiniboines would have been successful had I not forgotten to take with me my takes-fire-from-the-sun medicine. I shall go soon again to the Assiniboine camp, and next time I shall surely recover my pipe."
"Now, brother, how could you possibly do that?" White Wolf asked.
"Why, I should go into the camp in the evening and sneak around among the lodges, peeking into them one by one until I could see the pipe, and then I should either rush right in and take it or wait until the people slept."
"And that would be the end for you," White Wolf told him; "they would have your scalp before you could get ten steps away from the lodge."
"Best you come back to us," said Lone Walker. "For the sake of your woman and children, come back."
"Yes, to be whipped again!" my father exclaimed. "Let us cease talking about it; I remain with Short Bow."
Without another word our relatives and friends filed out of the lodge, Short Bow saying: "Well, be ready. We move camp in the morning."
I cannot begin to tell you how badly my mother and sister and I felt. We had set great hope on this talk. It had done no good: we were again to wander far from our people. And into what new dangers and troubles? we wondered.
Three days later we were back on the Little River with the Gros Ventres. My father was now about well and in good heart for doing things. He borrowed my gun when he chose, and did most of the hunting and beaver trapping. He intended to trade the first twenty beaver-skins he got for a new gun for himself.
For my mother and Nitaki and me the days now passed not unpleasantly. We had many friends among the Gros Ventres; several of them, as I have said, women of our own tribe, and their Pikuni-speaking children. When there was nothing else to do, and my father was away, we would talk about the good times we had had with our people at Ki-pah's fort.
On the morning that we left there my mother had whispered a long time with Sah-kwi-ah-ki, the trader's wife. Nitaki and I now often asked her what that talk had been about, but she would never tell us, except to say: "You will know what we planned when it happens. It is something very good. Something that will make us all happy."
Arose the sun to make another fine summer day for us: a day for ripening the berries hanging in great green bunches on the trees. My father went early to the traps, and returned singing happily, for he had three beaver-skins tied to his saddle. We three, sitting outside the lodge and watching him, were happy because of his happiness. When all was well with my father, it was good to be with him. Little did we think what was to happen to us before the setting of that pleasant sun.