Sinopah, the Indian Boy

by James Willard Schultz

This time the old man kneaded it steadily for as much as five minutes. Then he patted it down into a flat cake and ran the palm of his hand across it several times, making a smooth, dull polish on the surface. Then he pinched off a small portion and worked it with the fingers of both hands. The clay was now of just the tough softness of putty as the glazier uses it for setting window panes. "There! it is just right," said the old man. "Mind that you do not ever make the stuff any softer."

By this time all the other children had prepared their clay and were busily shaping out images of the buffalo. The older ones were quite skillful modelers and soon had two or three made and standing on the bank in front of them. Watching them, Sinopah began his work, taking a lump of the clay as large as he could hold in one hand and trying to shape it. He pinched and pulled, rounded and flattened the stuff for a long time, but could not get it to look like a buffalo or any other animal.

Grandfather Red Crane sat beside him, smoking his long pipe and saying not a word. Very often Sinopah would sigh, stop work, and look beseechingly up, and getting no offer of help, make another trial. And so it went on for a long time. Quite often the old man muttered some words, but the boy did not hear. He was praying; praying to the sun: "O great one! O you maker of the day and ruler of the world!" he kept saying; "give this boy of ours an enduring heart. Give him a brave heart. Give him the will to strive and keep striving for that which he wants."

And then, laying aside his pipe, he reached over and took the shapeless lump of clay from Sinopah. "You have done your best," he said; "I will now show you how to make an image."

He made a roll of the clay so that it was much larger around at one end than at the other, and then pressed it somewhat flat. "The buffalo is very tall in front," he said, "and quite low in his hindquarters, so we will fashion his high hump and his big head out of the large end of the clay."

He worked as he talked, pressing and squeezing and pushing the mass of stuff with thumbs and fingers, and in a very few minutes fashioned a very lifelike body of a buffalo. Then he found a slender dead branch of willow and broke from it four pieces for the legs, and stuck them into the body in their proper place. This made the model look very queer, standing as it did on pipe-like, wooden legs. But the old man was not done with the work. He next took more clay and covered the legs with it, fashioning the stuff on the sticks, covering them with it completely so that they very closely resembled the legs of the living animal. Much pleased with his success he set the little buffalo down before Sinopah and said: "There is a buffalo for you, my son; now let us see how good a one you can make."

Sinopah was very proud of the gift. He shouted to the other children to come and look at it, and they crowded around him bringing the animals they had made. Not one of them was so good as that modeled by the old man, and with fresh clay they began at once to try to do better work. The first buffalo that Sinopah made was not a good one, but at least it had the shape of one in a rough way. It was plain enough that he had tried to make a model of that animal. Old Red Crane, smoking his long-stemmed stone bowl pipe, sat close by all the morning and encouraged him; the boy made one model after another, improving each time. By the time the sun was straight above in the sky he had made seven little buffalo images, and the last one was a very fair likeness of the great shaggy beast of the plains.

It was now the middle of the day and the children were very hungry, but they were so interested in making clay buffalo that they would not go home to eat. Their mothers had thought of their needs, however, and coming very quietly to the play lodge under the trees, they built a small fire in it, and broiled plenty of fresh fat meat over the coals. Then they called the children and old Red Crane, and what a feast they all had. It was very simple fare; just meat, and a handful of dried service berries for each; but none of them wanted anything else; not even salt. Since the very beginning of things the Indians had lived on meat and a few berries, fresh or dried. It was the white man who taught them to have other wants.

After eating their fill, the children hurried back to the river and commenced modeling again. Now that they had numbers of clay buffalo, they made other animals; deer, bears, elk, bighorn, wolves, beavers, horses, antelope, and mountain goats. Along late in the afternoon each child had a really lifelike set of these. Grandfather Red Crane, still with them, said several times that it was time for the little ones to go home, but still they lingered, finishing just one more animal. They had eyes for their work only, but the old man was always looking about him, up and down the river, and across at the bluffs on the north side of the valley. Naught moved, or flew, or swam but what he saw it.