There is a story of a hunter who had before been a black bear, and had been given great magic power. He dared try to catch eagles from another man’s pit, and had his mind taken from him for doing so. Thus the gods punished him for entering ground that was not his own.
Lone Woman and Goes-Back-to-Next-Timber having withdrawn, my grandmother Turtle undertook to clear and break the ground that had been in dispute. She was a little woman but active, and she loved to work out-of-doors. Often, when my mothers were busy in the earth lodge, Turtle would go out to work in the field, and she would take me along for company. I was too little to help her any, but I liked to watch her work.
With her digging stick Turtle dug up a little round place in the center of the corner, and around this she circled from day to day, enlarging the dug-up space. She had folded her robe over her middle, like a pad. Resting the handle of her digging stick against her folded robe, she would drive the point into the soft earth to a depth equal to the length of my hand and pry up the soil.
She broke clods by striking them smartly with her digging stick. Roots of coarse grass, weeds, small brush and the like, she took in her hand and shook or struck them against the ground, to knock off the loose earth clinging to them. She then cast them into little piles to dry. In a few days she gathered these piles into a heap about four feet high and burned them.
My grandmother worked in this way all summer, but not always in the corner that had been in dispute. Some days, I remember, she dug along the edges of the field, to add to it and make the edges even. Of course, not all the labor of enlarging the field was done by Turtle; but she liked to have me with her when she worked, and I remember best what I saw her do.
It was my grandmother’s habit to rise early in the summer months. She often arrived at the field before sunrise; about ten o’clock she returned to the lodge to eat and rest.
One morning, having come to the field quite early, I grew tired of my play before my grandmother had ended her work. “I want to go home,” I begged, and I began to cry. Just then a strange bird flew into the field. It had a long curved beak, and made a queer cry, cur-lew, cur-lew.
I stopped weeping. My grandmother laughed.
“That is a curlew,” she said. “Once at the mouth of the Knife river, a woman went out with her digging stick to dig wild turnips. The woman had a babe. Growing tired of carrying her babe on her back, she laid it on the ground.