“The babe began to cry. The mother was busy digging turnips, and did not go to her babe as she should have done. By and by she looked up. Her babe was flying away as a bird!
“The bird was a curlew, that cries like a babe. Now, if you cry, perhaps you, too, will turn into a curlew.”
FIFTH CHAPTER
LIFE IN AN EARTH LODGE
The small lodges we built for winter did not stand long after we left them in the spring. Built on low ground by the Missouri, they were often swept away in the June rise; for in that month the river is flooded by snows melting in the Rocky Mountains.
The loss of our winter lodges never troubled us, however; for we thought of them as but huts. Then, too, we seldom wintered twice in the same place. We burned much firewood in our winter lodges, and before spring came the women had to go far to find it. The next season we made camp in a new place, where was plenty of dead-and-down wood for fuel.
We looked upon our summer lodges, to which we came every spring, as our real homes. There were about seventy of these, earth lodges well-built and roomy, in Like-a-Fishhook village. Most of them were built the second summer of our stay there.