WINTER 1879—80
Tä´kágyä Sai, "Eye-triumph winter." The name and story furnish a curious illustration of Indian belief. Káäsä´nte, "Little-robe" (or Little-hide), with two or three others, had gone to the North fork of Red river to look for antelope. According to another story they went to look for their old enemies, the Navaho, who, it seems, although now removed to their former reservation in western New Mexico, still occasionally penetrated thus far. Among them was a man named Pódodal (a variety of bird), who claimed to understand the language of owls, a bird believed by the Kiowa to be an embodied spirit. While resting one night in camp this man warned Little-robe not to go to bed, but to round up the ponies and keep watch over them, for an owl had told him that the Navaho would try to steal them that night. During the night Pódodal fired at something in the darkness, and on looking in the morning they found the trail of a man, and blood drops, which they followed for a long distance, but at last gave up the pursuit. That night the owl again came and told Pódodal that the wounded Navaho was lying dead beyond the point where they had turned back, and that he (the owl) would go and fetch him.
On rising in the morning Pódodal saw some strange-looking object lying on the ground in the lodge, and on examining it it proved to be the eye of a dead Navaho. On the advice of Pódodal they then abandoned the hunt and returned to the Kiowa camp, on a small branch of Apache creek (Sémät P'a), an upper branch of Cache creek. They carried with them the eye, hung at the end of a pole after the manner of a scalp, and danced over it as over a scalp on arriving at the camp on the small stream, since called Tä´-kágyä P'a, "Eye-triumph creek" from this circumstance.
It should be added that there were some skeptics who laughed at the whole story and declared that the eye was that of an antelope which Pódodal had secretly shot.
On the Set-t'an calendar the event is indicated by a figure intended to represent a scalp at the end of a pole, carried by a man wearing a striped robe to indicate his name, Little-robe. On the Anko calendar there is a representation of a scalp on a pole under the winter mark.