In Rain, the glamour of God's wilderness had taken human form as a red Indian girl with youth's delicious gravity of bearing, the childlike purity of the untainted savage, hale strength, athletic grace and eyes derisive. Sorrow had made her at that time aloof, remote from the world I lived in as a Madonna set above an altar, and yet her smile seemed to make fun of me. I looked up at her with reverence, with wonder, and if I loved, the love I offered to her was sacred, not profane. Yet if I seemed to worship, she would ridicule, so I had to pretend as a boy does to a girl. "Oh, don't mind me," I stuttered. "Please go on with that howl!"
"Boy-drunk-in-the-morning," she answered. "My dream, he say you come."
"So I have come," said I.
Years afterward, when I had learned her language, Rain told me in Blackfoot the whole story of the adventure, which led her to that meeting with me there on the plains at dawn.
She was a Blackfoot, of the Piegan or southern tribe, which settled in Montana, and her father was Brings-down-the-Sun, a war chief and a priest. In the winter before we met, the Piegan chiefs came to her father's lodge. At their request, he opened the sacred bundle of the Buffalo Mystery, whose ancient and solemn ritual engaged them for a day and a night in prayer. Afterward, they held a meeting of the council, to discuss the manifest wasting away of the bison herds on which the people depended for their food.
For years, the Stone-hearts (white men) had been slaughtering bison by millions for their hides, leaving the meat to rot. Now the last herds were surrounded by hungry tribes, and the end was in sight when the people must die of famine. So the chiefs sat in council.
Flat Tail had been told by his dream that all the buffaloes were hidden in a cave. Iron Shirt believed that the Stone-hearts were hiding the main herd in the country beyond the World-Spine (the Rocky Mountains). But Brings-down-the-Sun spoke of an Ojibway from the far East, who told him about the Man-it-o-ba or Land of the Great Spirit near to the lodge where the Sun God lived, from whence he rose each morning to cross the sky. "I am going," he told the council, "to this Land of God, and there I will open again my sacred bundle. I will speak to the Sun Spirit about our herds of bison, and How they are being wasted by the Stone-Hearts. I will pray that hearts of stone may be changed to flesh and blood lest all the people die."
So taking his daughter, Rain, to serve him in the ritual, Brings-down-the-Sun set out from their home beside the World-Spine, and traveled eastward for a thousand miles, crossing the plains to Manitoba, which was the Land of God. There at the sunrise making his prayer, he died, passing the threshold of God's house into the presence.
Rain showed me the hole where the Stone-hearts had buried her father. The ground spirits would catch him there, so she had torn up the earth and taken out the body. She had built a scaffold, where now her dead lay robed and armed in majesty, facing the sunrise. She had shot her father's horse so that its ghost might carry his shadow to the Sand Hills.
And afterward she had prayed.