This apote was a two-pronged stick about four feet long, decorated with wild sage. It was smooth and had no bark, and was brought out only once a year, for the Sun-dance. The keeper of it used it for beating time, in the dance. At the close of the dance it was stuck, forks up, in the ground in the center of the medicine lodge, and left until the next year.
When the stick was eighteen years old Konate's nephew planted it as before, at the close of the Sun-dance, in the center of the medicine lodge on the plain; and when the Kiowas returned, the next summer, for another Sun-dance, they discovered that the apote had been planted the other end up, and was putting forth green leaves!
For a stick eighteen years old, without bark, to do this, was certainly great medicine. No one now might doubt the story of Konate, to whom the taime spirit had talked, under the bough shelter by the Sun-mountain Spring.
None of the Kiowas dared to touch the apote, this time—or to stay near the medicine lodge. The dance was held at another place.
When, ten years later, or in October, 1867, the Kiowas met in a treaty council with the United States, near the present town of Medicine Lodge on Medicine Lodge Creek, southern Kansas, they were enabled to show that the apote had grown to be a large tree.
Such had been the strong medicine of Konate, to whom, about to die from his wounds, in his shelter by the Sun-mountain Spring beyond the Staked Plain, the taime spirit had talked.
Konate was dead; but K'a-ya-nti, his nephew, the other keeper of the stick, was still alive; and he knew.