Since public opinion hanged the Saviour of mankind, it seems to need a guide.
III
The fox who had lost his tail attempted to set a fashion in docked foxes.
So I, who could not ask for rations as an Indian, persuaded my friends to have no further dealings with the white man. His agent was a thief, his missionary, schoolmaster and farm instructor were a pack of fools, his regulations were fences to be jumped, his rations poison to their self-respect, his clothes were sinful forms of ugliness, his stuffy buildings killed them with consumption, his manners and customs ruined Indian women.
Our head chief gave me leave to form a band of hunters and trappers, men, women and children sworn to earn their living, and avoid the whites, to eat wild meat, to wear skin clothes, and be real Indians, not imitation whites.
And so we took to the woods.
Through our separation, Rain had played the woman, but from the time of our marriage was a child again, for life was one long game at which she played with happy gravity. When I confessed my trouble in keeping clear of Sarde, my enemy, because I wanted always to take his life, Rain went to work playing at magic, with all the simple earnestness she gave to cooking eggs. To her mind eggs, casting out devils and making poultices were parts of housekeeping, and she must have my soul cleaned or my socks patched, because she insisted on a tidy husband. She banished Sarde from my thoughts, she exorcised Red Saunders. She made me pray to the fairy animals, and threatened to sacrifice all my hair to the sun unless I behaved myself and spoke respectfully about my mother-in-law. This mother-in-law, if you please, was the beaver woman spirit who helped Rain in her dreams. It was not etiquette that I should meet the lady.
Among the Blackfeet, as with the whites and other barbarians, the women rule all they love. It was part of Rain's game to rule our wandering tribe, so we poor tribes-folk obeyed her when we had to.
Her religion forbade us to eat fish or ground game, but we needed a few sins just to keep us in practise, so when she had duly forbidden unholy food, she used to do the cooking. Her faith denied us the shooting of wolves because they were hunting comrades, but I must own that the government bounty on their scalps appealed to me more powerfully than religion—and then she gave my earnings to the poor.
In the matter of bears, however, Rain's piety was rather quarrelsome.