CHAPTER V
"SITTING-ALWAYS"
Among the many odd and unexpected things which Dusty Star found in the new life in the camp, one of the most peculiar and unaccountable was a grandmother, whose name was Sitting-Always.
Up to the present, a grandmother had been entirely wanting in the arrangement he called the World. That there was a great Spirit called the Sun, he knew. He also knew that there was another less great one called the Moon. And there were the stars. These also were spirits. They sat about in the sky and generally had a good time. If you watched them carefully against the tops of the lodge-poles, you could see that they gradually did their sitting a little higher up, or a little lower down; and sometimes, especially in the Mad Moon, they actually ran. To watch a star run swiftly down a steep place in the sky and disappear, made your heart jump. When the running stars which did not fall off into the dark reached the prairie, they turned into the puff-balls the Indians called "dusty-stars."
But a grandmother, it appeared, though neither a spirit nor a star, was a Great Power to be reckoned with. There were days when she painted her face bright yellow. These were solemn occasions. If you made a noise or got in her way, she would wrinkle her skin till the paint cracked. If you continued the annoyance, she would smack. As a painted curiosity Dusty Star observed her with awe.
His first introduction to her was not on one of her painted days. Without wanting to be rude he thought her face looked more like raw buffalo hide than anything else he had yet met. Her hands also seemed of that material, and did not feel pleasant when they felt his arms and legs. Dusty Star objected to being mauled, even by a Great Power; but he bore it as well as he could, because his mother told him to stand still; only from that day onwards his grandmother's hands were the part of her body he most thoroughly distrusted.
The second time he saw her was when she came to the tepee on her way to take part in a medicine-bundle ceremony. She was very grandly dressed in a beaded buckskin robe, and her face was thickly coated with the famous yellow paint. Dusty Star was squatting with Kiopo at the back of the tepee, watching his mother making pemmican, when this yellow vision peered in upon them through the opening. He stared at it with astonishment. He was not afraid, but it made him feel uncomfortable. It was as if his grandmother's face, like the maple leaves, had gone yellow with the Fall. And from the middle of the yellow, her sunken eyes glared blackly in the hollows of her head.
Kiopo also disapproved of the vision. That was very plain by the way his hair bristled along his back, and his upper lip curled back to show his fangs while he snarled.
The yellow face of Sitting-Always scowled between the eyes, and made the paint crack. She declared she would not enter the tepee unless the husky was first driven out. When Nikana explained that Kiopo was not a husky but a true wild wolf, and that when he snarled through his teeth it was best to let him be, Sitting-Always was more displeased than ever. Like most old Indians she firmly believed that the wolves had a "medicine," and by a "medicine" she meant a power that was stronger than either wolves or men. She herself was a great believer in "medicine." Half the things with which her tepee was stuffed were supposed to possess a medicine of one kind or another. Only she infinitely preferred tame medicine—the sort you stored in painted parfleches—to the wild kind on four legs that bared its fangs and snarled. So when she had shot out a few biting remarks about beasts and boys in general, she took her yellow face out of the opening and stalked angrily away.
After that Dusty Star saw her quite often when Nikana took him with her on visits to her tepee, and the yellow maple-leaf face had given way to the buffalo-hide one, and her teeth were the only yellow things she had in her head. By degrees, his awe of her wore away, till one day when she presented him with a rich plateful of sarvis-berry stew, he arrived at the conclusion that, after all, a grandmother, like the buffalo, could have her uses, and be very nearly pleasant when she did not paint her face.