“Then when the little girl was big enough, her grandmother taught her how to make a tepee cover out of hide, and how to set it up with the tepee poles fixed together at the top just so; and how to set the smoke-flap at the peak to suit the wind and make a fire burn without smoking the people out; and how to take the tepee down quickly and put it on a pony-drag in a hurry, if there should be an attack and the women had to run away with the children and the ponies while the men were fighting.
“The little girls used to get together and play village, with their tepees all set in a circle, just right, with the opening to the place where you are always looking [the south]; and there were buckskin dolls stuffed with grass for children; and the little boys played they were chiefs and councilors and warriors. Of course, there had to be horses.”
The old man sat chuckling for a while before he continued.
“I think I was about eight years old that time, and I was getting big fast, for my grandfather would let me have some sharp arrows if I would be careful, and I had killed a rabbit already—maybe two. Many of our people were camped not far from the soldiers’ town on Duck River [Fort Laramie]. It was summer, and there was big trouble coming. The old people were all talking about the bad Wasichus and how they were crazy again because they had found gold in our country; and they wanted to make a road through it and scare all the bison away, and then maybe we would all starve. It was the time just before Red Cloud went to war, and the people were camped there waiting to see what would happen.
“We little Oglala boys were playing killing-all-the-soldiers; but we got tired doing that, because nobody wanted to be a soldier, and we had to kill people who were not there at all. And one of the boys said, ‘Let us quit killing soldiers. They are all dead anyway, and they are no good. The Miniconjou girls and boys have got a village over there. Let us charge upon them and steal all their horses!’ So we all cried, ‘hi-yay,’ and began to get ready for the charge with our bows and blunt arrows and old sunflower stalks for spears.
“And when we had crawled up on our bellies as close to the village as we could get without being seen by the enemy, we leaped up and cried ‘hoka-hey’ all together and charged on the village.
“It was a big fight, a big noise. We could have won a victory, because we all said that one Oglala boy was better than two or three Miniconjous; but some of the bigger boys over there got after us, and we had to run.
“And while I was running, I looked back over my shoulder to see how big a boy was chasing me. And it was not a big boy or even a little boy. It was a girl—a pretty little girl—but she looked terrible with her hair all over her head in the wind she made with her running; and she was yelling and swinging a rawhide rope while she ran. I was longer legged than she was, but she caught me around the neck with her rope anyway. Maybe all at once I wanted to be caught. And she said, ‘You bad boy! You are just a shonka-’kan [horse], and you are going to pull my tepee.’
“So I let her lead me back to her village; and all the Miniconjou boys poked their fingers at me and yelled and wanted to charge me and coup me; but she picked up a stick and yelled back at them, ‘You leave my horse alone or I will hit you.’ And, of course, if I was a horse I wasn’t a warrior any more.
“So I got down on my hands and knees and she hitched the drag-poles on me and packed her tepee on them. And when I snorted and pranced, she petted me on the rump and sang to me, so that I was as tame as the other little boys who were being horses too and helping to move camp away from the enemy country.”