CHAPTER VIII SPINNING TOP
Winter was now come, but the people were very comfortable in their lodges in the Two Medicine Valley. After all, the winters are very mild on the plains close under the Rocky Mountains in Montana. Sometimes a blizzard swoops down from the north, bringing some snow and intense cold, but it seldom lasts long. Within a few days a Chinook wind comes out of the west, a wind that started from the Japan Current of the Pacific Ocean, eight hundred miles away, and this is so warm that it kills the blizzard and melts the snow. Sometimes, even in January, this wind is so very warm that it makes the air feel as if summer had really come. This is the way it usually is on the northern Montana plains in winter. But about once in twenty years the north wind keeps the west wind back for a couple of months or more. Then the snow falls deep, and the thermometer stays away down below zero, and the animals and birds die by the hundred. At such a time I have seen more than a hundred antelope, a whole band, lying frozen to death on the plain.
This was a good winter; too good, the boys and girls thought, for they wanted the river to freeze over so they could play on the ice. So it was that one night when Sinopah was going to crawl into his warm buffalo-robe couch, he made a short prayer to Ai-sto-yim-sta, Cold-Maker. He was the god who lived in the north, and who made raids into the southland, hidden always in the swirling snow of the terrible blizzards he made.
"Hai-yu, Ai-sto-yim-sta," little Sinopah piped shrilly, "have pity on all of us children. Come quickly; come this night and make ice for us to play on."
His mother heard him and cried out to White Wolf: "Now what do you think this naughty boy is doing? He prays Cold-Maker to come and make ice for him."
"Is it so!" his father exclaimed. "Sinopah, come here. I have something to say. Now, listen!" he went on, when he had the boy close in his arms. "Cold-Maker is a bad god, and you must never pray to him to come. He is not like the Sun, the great giver of life; he is the giver of death. Many and many a one of our people he has done to death. You pray him to come and make ice. Well, away out there on the plains are many of our hunters. They are coming slowly toward camp; very slowly because their horses are carrying heavy loads of meat for the women and children, and hides to be tanned into soft, warm robes. Now, suppose that Cold-Maker does come; come now, this night? You will have the ice to play on, yes. But other children will have no fathers: they will be lying dead out on the plain."
"Oh, I didn't think of that," said Sinopah. "Cold-Maker is a bad god. I will never pray again to him. But I would like to have some ice."
"The ice will come soon enough," said White Wolf. "Now, go you to your robes and sleep."