“That evening they really treated me as a guest. Father even filled a pipe for me, and then, when my mother’s deep breathing from her place on the sleeping bench told us that she slumbered, he asked me outright, ‘What animal spirit or other Manitou has offered himself to be your helper?’ ‘I do not know,’ I answered, and then I told him my dream, fearing in my heart that he would think it meant nothing.
“‘Son’, he said when I had finished, ‘you have done better than I dared to hope, you have indeed gained a powerful friend among Those-above-us, no less a personage than one of the Thunders!’ And when I asked him how he knew, he replied, ‘The wooden war club with a round head painted red is the emblem of the Thunder-Beings, and represents the fearful blows they strike. The fact that, while you held this club in your hand, the arrows did not wound you, means that your Guardian Spirit, the Thunder, will protect you. Don’t you understand?’
“All that night in my dreams I was struggling and fighting, with whom I know not, but through it all I heard myself singing,
In my trouble
In my trouble
I call upon my Helper
And his answer
Out of a dark sky
It comes rumbling,
It comes rumbling!