The medicine men then said to Missouri River, “Choose a place for your lodge!”
Missouri River took the two skulls, one in either hand, and singing a mystery song, walked around the circle with his right hand toward the center, as moves the sun. Three times he walked around, the fourth time he stopped at a place and prayed, “My gods, you are my protectors, protect also this village. Send also rains that our grain may grow, and our children may eat and be strong and healthy. So shall we prosper, because my sacred bundle is in the village.“
He turned to the company upon the grass. “Go, the rest of you,” he said, “and choose where you will build your lodges; and keep the circle open, as I have marked!”
Before Missouri River died, he sold his sacred bundle to my grandfather, Small Ankle; and Small Ankle sold it to his son, Wolf Chief. After Wolf Chief became a Christian, he sold the bundle to a man in New York, that it might be put into a museum.
We had other beliefs, besides these of the gods.
We thought that all little babies had lived before, most of them as birds, or beasts, or even plants. My father, Son-of-a-Star, claimed he could even remember what bird he had been.
We believed that many babies came from the babes’ lodges. There were several of these. One was near our villages on the Knife River. It was a hill of yellow sand, with a rounded top like the roof of an earth lodge. In one side was a little cave, and the ground about the cave’s mouth was worn smooth, as if children played there. Sometimes in the morning, little footprints were found in the sand.
To this hill a childless wife would come to pray for a son or daughter. She would lay a pair of very beautiful child’s moccasins at the mouth of the cave and pray: “I am poor. I am lonesome. Come to me, one of you! I love you. I long for you!” We understood that children who came from this babes’ lodge had light skin and yellowish hair, like yellow sand.
A very old man once said to me: “I remember my former life. I lived in a babes’ lodge. It was like a small earth lodge inside. There was a pit before the door, crossed by a log. Many of the babes, trying to cross the pit, fell in. But I walked the whole length of the log; hence I have lived to be an old man.” I have heard this story from other old men.
Very small children, who died before they teethed or were old enough to laugh, were not buried upon scaffolds with our other dead, but were wrapped in skins and placed in trees. We thought if such a baby died, that its spirit went back to live its former life again, as a bird, or plant, or as a babe in one of the babes’ lodges.