And then came the corn harvest, busiest and happiest time of all the year. It was hard work gathering and husking the corn, but what fun we had! For days we girls thought of nothing but the fine dresses we should wear at the husking.
While the ears were ripening my sister and I went every morning to sit on our watch stage and sing to the corn. One evening we brought home with us a basketful of the green ears and were husking them by the fire. My father gathered up the husks and took them out of the lodge. I wondered why he did so.
“I fed the husks, daughter, to my pack horses,” he said, when he came back. “To-morrow I go hunting to get meat for the husking.” He had brought his hunting pony into the lodge, but he had penned his pack horses for the night under the corn stage.
My two mothers, I knew, were planning a big feast. “We have much corn to husk,” they said, “and we must have plenty of food, for we do not want our huskers to go away hungry.”
Small Ankle left us before daybreak. He returned the fourth day after, about noon, with two deer loaded on his pack horses. “One is a black-tail,” he told us when he came in the lodge, “a buck that I killed yesterday in some bad lands by the Little Missouri. He was hiding in a clump of trees. As I rode near, he winded me and ran out into the open. I checked my pony, and the buck stopped to look around. I fired, and he fell; but, when I got off my horse, the buck rose and tried to push me with his horns. I killed him with my knife.” A wounded black-tail often tried to fight off the hunters: a white-tail hardly ever did so.
The next morning we women rose early, and with our baskets hastened to the cornfield. All day we plucked the ripe ears, bearing them in our baskets to the center of the field, where we laid them in a long pile. That night my father and Red Blossom slept on the watchers’ stage, to see that no horse broke in and trampled our corn pile. There was not much danger of this. Around the field ran a kind of fence, of willows, enough to keep out the ponies.
The rest of us returned to the lodge to make ready for the feast the next day. Turtle fetched out three great bundles of dried buffalo meat and piled them on the puncheon bench with the freshly killed deer meat. Our three kettles were scoured and set by, ready to be taken to the field.
At nightfall Bear’s Tail went around the village to lodges of our relatives and friends, and invited the young men to come to our husking.
I was too excited that night to sleep much. Early in the morning my sister and I rose and went to the river for a dip in its cold waters. After a hasty breakfast I put on my best dress, of deer skin, with hoofs hanging like bangles at the edge of the skirt and three rows of costly elk teeth across the front. Cold Medicine helped me paint my face, and was careful to rub a little red ochre in the part of my hair.