Then Rising Wolf awakened from his dream, to find himself in the guest lodge, and through the open doorway saw the rose flush of the sunrise lighting the pinnacles of the Apse of Ice. Rain sat beside him, her hand upon his forehead. "Remember!" she was whispering—"remember!"
"He called me Doggie," answered Rising Wolf. "Storm's dog. I shall remember. While I live, I shall remember."
CHAPTER IX
THE STRIKING OF THE CAMP
So far back as the year 1813, Hugh Monroe had been apprenticed to the Hudson's Bay Company, and posted to a fort at the headwaters of the Saskatchewan. The three tribes of the Blackfoot nation, the Blackfeet, Bloods, and Piegans, brought their trade to that post, where the trader in charge had misgivings, lest presently they be misled into dealing with the Americans, whose hearts were bad and their goods inferior. So, one of the three tribes being at the fort, the trader detailed young Monroe to join them, travel and live with the people, win their confidence, and steer them judiciously lest evil communications of the American Fur Company corrupt the good manners of the Blackfoot nation.
A few days out on the trail southward the chiefs, with whom young Monroe was riding, came in an afternoon to the brow of the prairie, overlooking a meadow where the tribal camp would be pitched for the night halt. They dismounted to sit on the hill, watching the procession file past, and one of the chiefs had trouble with flint, steel, and tinder, kindling a pipe which would not light.
The lad took the pipe, and held a burning-glass in focus until the tobacco kindled. Not perceiving the lens, but supposing that the Stoneheart had the direct aid of their Sun God, the chiefs hailed the event as a miracle, and Hugh Monroe as a great medicine man. He was given a name of honor—Rising Wolf. Long afterwards, though hand mirrors came into general use for signaling, and the burning-glass for kindling a camp fire, this Rising Wolf's reputed sun power, which was really common sense, continued to give his voice weight in the Blackfoot Council. As time went by he married into the tribe, became the father of a family, and continued among the people, for a matter of sixty years. He was eighty-five years old when his life ended, and in his memory one of the high peaks of the Rocky Mountains is named Mount Rising Wolf.
It would be difficult to find a criticism of the holy lodge more sane, temperate, and impartial than that of the gentle adventurer. Without the slightest doubt as to their power, he spoke of the seers as cranks. "Seems to me," he said in after-years, "the offense of a crank is not that he is right, but that his rectitude puts other folk in the wrong. And as cranks, the seers were so damned aggravating."
Thus one may be a vegetarian without malice, in so far as one is opposed on principle to uric acid in the blood. Or one may prefer, quite reasonably, the gift of vision to the juiciest buffalo steak. There is no harm in claiming merit for a meatless diet approved by sound physicians on the one part, by mystics on the other. Offense only begins when one calls one's friends foul feeders even as pigs and dogs, or taunts the neighbors with the suggestion that eaters of rabbits are quite capable of devouring the baby. An enthusiast without the restraint of common sense or the slightest fear of consequences, Rain commended the vegetarian tenets to Red Indians who must train themselves in hunting, live by the chase, and migrate with the game on pain of being starved in peace, or rudely scalped in war. So much said Rising Wolf outright, but the priestess, very calm and aloof, observed that he was quite ignorant without being at all clever. Yet the adventurer knew, as Rain did not, how lewd, frivolous young savages in the camps make no end of fun out of the vegetarian doctrine, while Many Horses and other chiefs used to say that the sacred woman was becoming a holy nuisance.
If Rain led, Storm was a close follower. Having sacrificed his gun, and afterwards his wife's bow and arrows to the Sun Spirit, he began to observe that the vicinity of the holy lodge was looked upon by the birds and the beasts as a sanctuary. He loved them. They trusted him. They let him witness all sorts of their affairs, and their ceremonies, such as the small bird's jig in lugging the rest of a worm out of the ground, or the bear's height mark scored on a tree trunk from time to time as he grows, the field mouse dance, or ructions at porcupine lodge. Many animals with a sense of humor would come to hear him sing "Tom Bowling," or, with much gravity and deportment, play at congregation while he preached.