Excitement was in the air. Packs of dogs ran barking through the camp. Men and boys galloped over the hills, shouting and singing, rounding up bands of horses and driving them to water, picketing them in the meadows and driving others to feed on the grassy hills. Women were at work cooking, stacking lodge-poles or handling unwieldy covers flapping in the wind.
My lodge was pitched in the band of the Hard-Top-Knots, near Mad Wolf’s tepee, where the ceremony of the Sun Dance was taking place. I shared it with Little Creek and Strikes-on-Both-Sides, my Indian sister, and their children, also Tears-in-Her-Eyes, a niece of Mad Wolf’s, a baby of six months whom Strikes-on-Both-Sides adopted, because the mother had died in childbirth.
Near by was the lodge of Morning Eagle, an aged warrior, the hero of many battles. He was so old and decrepit he had to be lifted from his horse. Every morning before sunrise, he wakened me, singing his medicine songs. He was not musical and they all sounded alike; the only variation being slight changes in the rhythm, or in the bird or animal calls, at the end of each song. On a cold and rainy day, he crawled from his tepee to drive back the storm. In spite of his age and rheumatism, he sat in the wind and rain, singing and praying to the Maker of the Storm.
Another neighbor was Little Owl, who had a large family. I watched them every day at their outside fire. His pretty [[254]]young wife, Coming Running, was tall and slender, with jet-black hair, which hung in heavy braids below her waist. Strong and healthy, she was always at work, with a flock of small children about her. She had many cares—a babe in arms and a small daughter with a dangerous abscess, and two visitors to entertain from the Flathead tribe. Yet she was always smiling and in a good humor. I did not hear her complain or speak an angry word.
She had a little play-tepee for the children, made by a blanket fastened round a cluster of poles. There they kept their playthings—dolls with deerskin suits decorated with real beads and feathers, dolls in baby cases, also little robes and blankets and cooking utensils. The boys had bows and arrows, and stilts made of cottonwood, crooked sticks for hobbyhorses and wooden tops.
At the tepee of Running Fisher, I saw a pet coyote puppy, and at another place a tame magpie sitting on top of a lodge-pole. In former days these Indians had many pets—hawks, eagles and cranes, beavers, wolves and antelope. A chief had two grizzly bears for pets. They were so well trained he could make them lie down with noses between their paws.
Another Indian had a pet crane, which followed him everywhere, and was said to be very wise. The man and the crane went so much together the people called them father and son. Whenever he left the crane behind, it mourned and was unhappy, going through the camp, even into tepees, until it found its master and stood beside him.
I met an elderly man from the north, whose name was Natosin (Sun Chief). He was over six feet in height and had long gray hair falling over his shoulders. He was venerable in appearance and his face had a kindly expression. He occupied a small traveling-lodge and had two travois to carry his baggage, one with a wicker frame of green branches [[255]]built over the seat, to shield him and his aged wife from the sun. When I asked him how it happened they came so far to attend a Sun Dance, he said:
“Last winter I was very ill; the doctors said I was going to die. But I made a vow to the Sun; if I recovered I would attend the next Sun Dance, wherever it might be. In the spring I heard that Mad Wolf and his wife were giving the ceremony, so I came from the north to fulfill my vow and eat one of the sacred tongues.”
I saw two women tanning a deerhide stretched on the ground, hair-side down, and held in place by wooden stakes. They raked it with large tools of bone sharpened at one end. Then they used an adzelike tool, removing the surface of the hide in chips, and made it of uniform thickness. When they had finished the flesh side, they turned the hide over and scraped off the hair and left it to bleach and cure in the sun.