Then Rattler signed that it was time for us to sing. He raised his medicine drum and beat slowly and rhythmically. Holding his head back and with eyes closed, he began to sing, while I joined with him. In the meantime, his wife was going through dancing motions on her knees, moving her body in time with the beating of the drum and joining with us in a chant.
Her power to heal came through the medium of a dream. A buffalo bull appeared and said: “You will profit from my body. Behold! I give these herbs whereby you can heal the sick.”
In her doctoring, First Strike imitated the actions of her dream-buffalo, the way she saw it doctoring another buffalo. She covered herself with a buffalo robe and knelt beside the patient. She pawed the ground, hooked with her head, and imitated the sounds of a buffalo. Then she breathed on a piece of buffalo-skin to give it power; she held it towards the patient, swaying her body in time with the beating of the drum. She laid the buffalo-skin on a hot stone and then placed it quickly on the left side of the sick man, the place where the trouble lay. She put her hands into the root medicine; she touched a hot stone with the wet tips of her fingers and, with a quick movement, placed them on the body of her patient. In this way she made hot applications on both sides of his body, using three hot stones, one after the other.
When First Strike had finished her doctoring, Rattler made ready. With his massive figure and benign countenance, his long gray hair in waves over his shoulders, he was an imposing doctor, one to inspire confidence in a sick person. Rattler did not make use of herbs or roots. In his dream an eagle had bestowed upon him power to heal, directing him how to proceed and showing him the motions to use.
First, Rattler beat loudly on his medicine drum. He signed to me to join him in a song and swayed his body in [[272]]time with the drumming. Then he used an eagle wing, imitating the flying of an eagle; he beat the wing against the body of his patient—the way he saw the eagle do in his dream. He sprayed yellow paint through the hollow wing-bones of eagles, first over his arms and breast, then over his entire body, and prayed:
“Listen! I beseech you, the power in my dream.
Help me cure this sick man.
Do not deceive me.
You said this was the way to doctor.
Here is the wing; I use it right.