I heard all this talk going on one night when they thought I was asleep. Washakie agreed with most of what his mother said, but of course they couldn’t change the Indians’ way of doing things.
“She used to tell me her troubles.”
CHAPTER SEVEN MY INDIAN MOTHER
My Indian mother was as good and kind to me as any one could be, but she did not seem to realize that there was another loving mother miles and miles away whose heart was sorrowing because of my absence. To her mind must have come many times these words of the old song: “Oh, where is my wandering boy tonight?”
My Indian mother would often ask me a good many questions about my white mother. She asked me if I did not want to go home. I told her that I should like to see my folks very much, but if I went home they would keep me there, and I did not want to herd sheep. I told her that I would rather play with white boys than with Indian boys, but that I liked my bow and arrows, and father would not let me have these at home because I would be shooting at the cats and chickens all the time. “I like my pony too, and I could not take him home,” I said, “and I love you too. If I went away you could not go with me; so taking it all around I should rather stay with you.”
This always seemed to please her; for her face would light up and sometimes a tear would steal down her brown cheeks, and then she would grab me and hug me until you could hear my ribs crack.
Often she would tell me about her troubles. Her husband had been shot a few years before in the knee with a poisoned arrow by the Crow Indians. He lived a little over a year after the battle, but he suffered greatly before he died. Soon after his death her two boys named Piubi and Yaibi went out hunting mountain sheep. While they were climbing a steep hill, a snowslide crashed down and buried them in the deep gorge at the bottom of the canyon. Here they lay until late in the following spring. The Indians tried to find their bodies by pushing long sticks into the snow, but they could not locate them.
But their mother would not give up the search. She told me how she would go out every day and dig in the snow with a stick in the hope of finding her boys, until she got so sick that Washakie and some other Indians brought her home, where she lay for two months very near death from sorrow and exposure.
As soon as she could walk she went up to the snowslide again. The warmer weather by this time had melted some of the snow, and she found the body of one of her boys partly uncovered. The wolves had eaten off one of his feet. She quickly dug the body out of the snow, and near by she found the other boy. She was too weak to carry them back to the tepee, and she couldn’t leave them there to be eaten by the wolves, so she stayed all night watching over them.