Kiopo, however, never changed his mind. Not even the richest stew could have made any difference. With or without her paint, his deep wolf wisdom taught him that here was an enemy, and whenever she came near him, he always showed his teeth.
It was in the moon that the Indians call the Mad Moon, or, as we call it, November, that Kiopo began to take on strange ways, and to stay away, for days together. When he returned from these mysterious absences, he was in the habit of sneaking back into camp under cover of the darkness. In the morning, when Dusty Star spoke to him very plainly, and asked him where he had been, Kiopo would turn his head away with an uncomfortable expression in his eyes. Dusty Star began to watch the wolf's movements, growing more and more anxious to find out where he went. And the closer the human brother watched, the deeper grew the wolf-brother's cunning day by day. Neither going, nor returning, did Kiopo let himself be seen.
Dusty Star grew afraid lest he should disappear once for all, and never return. His fear was so torturing that he tied him with a raw-hide thong, and fastened it to one of the lodge-poles. There was a high wind that night, and the poles strained and creaked; but it was not entirely owing to the wind; and, in the morning, Kiopo had gone.
Those were the evenings when Dusty Star, lying awake in the tepee, could hear the coyotes raise that eerie song of theirs which they love to sing after sunset on the high buttes. It always began in the same way, with a succession of short barks, growing gradually louder and higher, and always ending with a long-drawn, squalling howl. And as the boy caught the high-pitched, yowling cries ringing out in the dusky air, he knew that God's Dog, as the Indians called him, was at his medicine-making again, making medicine with his voice. Through enormous spaces of the twilight, these uncanny cries set his brain spinning. The cries ceased to be mere coyote notes; they became voices crying the names of unfamiliar, yet unforgettable things; until at last, when the unearthly chorus became too piercing to be borne, he pulled the buffalo robe over his head, to deaden the terrible sound.
If the coyote cries affected Dusty Star so powerfully, they affected Kiopo equally, though in a different way. At times they made him angry, at others, wholly miserable. When Kiopo felt upset, he always wanted to get hold of something to worry with his teeth. So the raw-hide thong came in very useful, and after gnawing for half the night, Kiopo was free. Once his own master again, he did not waste valuable time sitting down to think. Softly as a trail of mist, he drifted out of camp, and not a husky of them all winded him or saw him go.
The very morning after Kiopo's departure, Sitting-Always was taken ill. She lay on her couch of antelope skins and moaned with pain. While Nikana went to summon the medicine-man, Little Fish, Dusty Star was left to watch his grandmother. He had never seen any one ill before, and the noises she uttered made him feel uncomfortable. When he asked her if the pain was in her chest, she said it was lower down. Dusty Star nodded his head wisely. He had suffered pain in that part himself. It was the place that made you wish you had not eaten berries before they were ripe. He observed his grandmother gravely for some time. Suddenly without warning, he doubled up his fist and thumped her on the spot where she complained of the pain. This he did, because he knew that if you hit things, they sometimes went away. He hoped that if he could hit his grandmother's pain right in the middle, it might drive it out.
Sitting-Always uttered a loud cry. Mistaking it for a shout of triumph, Dusty Star struck her again. This was more than she could bear, and she uttered such a piercing scream that the boy was startled. Still it seemed to prove that the thumping was taking effect. He was preparing to smite her for the third time when his mother came hurrying into the tepee.
With groans of pain and anger, Sitting-Always explained what had happened. Naturally Nikana was very angry. She could hardly believe that the boy could have dared to take advantage of his grandmother's helplessness to play her so evil a trick. Without waiting to hear his own account of the matter, she gave him a sound cuff or two, and ordered him to go at once and fetch Lone Chief, the medicine-man, since Little Fish had said he could not come.
Only too glad to escape, Dusty Star rushed indignantly out of the tepee.
Lone Chief's tepee lay at some distance from the camp, round the north-west corner of Eagle Bluff. He was understood to be a great medicine-man. His medicine, or Supernatural Power, was very strong, though it was not always that he could be prevailed upon to put it to the test. Among the many mysterious things about Lone Chief was that no one could ever say with certainty where he was to be found. Wandering across vast spaces or journeying to the edge of the world, had got into his feet. Hunters from the far west would bring tidings of his camp on the shore of the mighty lake that washes the feet of the Rockies for half-a-hundred miles. Deep in the North, on the lonely barrens where the wolves howled at sundown, and the red-fringed pools were a-glimmer in an unearthly light, his slightly drooping figure might be seen moving soundlessly in the windy twilight along the deep-worn trails of the caribou. Or in the torrid south lands where the salt lakes were caked with brine, and the antelopes, startled by the solitary figure, floated across the desert like vapours carried by the air, Lone Chief travelled till he filled his head with the roar of the gulf of Mexico.