Old Porcupine Bear was a savage-looking character—one of the very old warriors who seldom left camp. One never knew how old some of these aged Indians were, and many of them did not know themselves how many seasons they had lived. This old man, we figured, must be a hundred years old.
"Will there be rain, Porcupine?" I asked him. "Will you hold your Rain Dance soon?"
The deep wrinkles in his leathery face were hard set as if from pain. His coal-black hair, streaked with gray and hanging loose over his shoulders, looked as if it had not been combed for days.
"To-wea," he wailed. "My to-wea (my woman). Him sick. The fever. Goin' die." He dropped his face into the palm of his hard hand and let it lie there motionless in demonstration of her passing. He wanted to get a box like white squaws had, the boxes in which they went to the Happy Hunting Ground.
He was on the road to Pierre for a coffin. Others of the tribe, we gathered, had put in money to help buy it. He opened a beaded sack and showed us. There was enough to buy a pretty good one. In broken Sioux and signs we advised him to wait—mebbe-no-die. Mebbe-walk-some-more. He shook his head stubbornly. His herbs—he was a medicine man who had healed many sick ones—had not worked. Even his pazunta had failed.
The Indian's pazunta was his shield against disease—against all evil. It drives the Evil Spirit away. It may be anything he selects—an herb, a stone, a rabbit's foot—so long as he selects it secretly and divulges to no one what it is. The pazunta is invested with divine curative power, according to the Indians.
When he got back to his wigwam with the satin-lined "last-sleep-box," Porcupine Bear found his to-wea cooking supper; so the old brave, it was said, slept in the good soft bed himself. "Why not?" said Ida Mary. He had slept on the ground and fought many hard battles; let him have his cushioned resting place while he could enjoy it; but I shuddered at the thought.
A week or so later he came again. It was a day when I was at the breaking point. He stood looking at me, shaking his head as he had done over his to-wea. I must have looked like a ghost, for in a gesture of friendship he said:
"You want my last-sleep-box?"
The prairie fire had not got me down, but at the thought of that box I went to bed and stayed there three days.