Sinopah, the Indian Boy

by James Willard Schultz

"Grandfather, when can I go fast and get my medicine?" Sinopah asked when the old man had finished.

"Oh, not for a long time. Not until you have seen sixteen or eighteen winters," he replied.

And then, tucked under warm, soft buffalo robes by his mother, the boy almost at once fell asleep.

The next morning every one was up before sunrise and ready for the trapping of the buffalo. Some young men had slept out on the plains back of the cliffs, and hurrying into camp they reported that a band of five or six hundred of the animals were grazing on the second ridge north of the valley. Old Red Crane said that his dream had been favorable. He tossed up a feather, found that the wind was from the northwest, and gave orders for the people to go to the rock-piles. In a few minutes several hundred men and women, girls and boys, were climbing a trail out of the valley at the lower end of the cliffs. They went on foot, Sinopah's father leading him and helping him up over the hardest places. Not until all of the climbers had reached the top of the cliff, and disappeared out on the plain, did old Red Crane start. He rode a small, swift horse that was covered with a buffalo robe, and himself wore a robe of the same kind. He went some distance down the valley and climbed out of it by an easy, sloping trail.

Meantime Sinopah, with his father and the other people, had come to the top of the cliffs at their eastern end, and then turned westward along the edge of them. After walking a half-mile or more, they came to where they were highest and steepest, there being in that place a straight drop of more than a hundred feet to the boulder-covered slope below. Here on top of the cliff, a little way back from the brink and a hundred yards apart, began two ever-widening rows of rock-piles that extended out on the plain for more than a mile like an enormous letter V. Beyond them was a low ridge, and still farther north another ridge, on which a large herd of buffalo were feeding.

White Wolf now turned to the people and told them to hurry and conceal themselves behind the piles of rock, and they scattered out along the two lines of the V, one or two and sometimes three people stopping and lying down beside each pile. Sinopah was very impatient: he kept jerking his father's hand and asking questions, but for what seemed to him a long time the chief would not answer.

At last not one person was to be seen out there on the plain: nothing was in sight but the rows of rock-piles, and far away the black mass of feeding buffalo. Then White Wolf lifted the boy up on his shoulder and began to explain: "Pretty soon you will see your grandfather riding out toward that first ridge," he said, "so watch for him."

Sinopah looked for the old man; looked so hard that water came to his eyes and he had to wipe it away. When he looked off again, he saw what appeared to be a small, single buffalo climbing the first ridge out toward the buffalo herd. His father told him that the object was his grandfather on horseback. The old man was lying down on the animal, so as to make it appear that it had a high, humped back, and covered as both he and the horse were with buffalo robes, they did, indeed, together look like a small buffalo.

From the top of the ridge the plain extended out with an even rise to the next ridge, on which the herd was feeding. As soon as the old man reached it, he began to ride in circles, each time nearer and nearer those whose attention he sought to attract. And quite often he tickled the horse between the legs with a stick, making it kick up its heels in a very funny manner.

"If you were there," the chief told Sinopah, "you would hear your grandfather making a very queer moaning sound—m-m-m-ah! m-m-m-ah!—just as a buffalo calf does when it is in pain, or is frightened."