“What’s that?” the men asked.
“Buffalo,” he answered.
“How on earth did it get up here?” said Mr. Crimmins. “There are only three things, without wings, which can climb this cliff, surely,—goats, mountain sheep, and men. You needn’t try to tell me a buffalo could climb up here!”
“Shan’t try,” the Ranger answered. “A Blackfoot brought that up.”
“What for?” Joe asked.
“To use for a pillow while he was getting his medicine. You know, when an Indian boy gets about the age of you scouts, he has to take a sweat bath (made by putting hot stones in a closed lodge and pouring water on ’em) to purify himself, and then he goes off to some wild, lonely place and just waits there, naked, without any food, till he has a vision. This vision tells him what his special ‘medicine’ is to be, which will bring him good luck. Old Yellow Wolf told me we’d find the skull up here. He knew the brave that brought it up for a pillow. He said the young Indian stayed four days on the summit before he got his ‘medicine.’”
“Say, if I stayed up here four days, naked, I’d need some medicine when I got down!” young Crimmins laughed. “Let’s take the skull for a souvenir.”
“Oh, no!” Joe cried, forgetting that he was only a cook and guide for the party. “That would be—be desecration! Let it stay here, where the Indian left it!”
Mr. Crimmins looked at him sharply but kindly. “Joe is right,” he said. “Let it stay here as a record of a race too fast vanishing. I like to think of that naked Indian boy, all alone, climbing this great rock tower and for four whole days sitting up here far above the world, waiting for a vision from his gods. You wouldn’t catch one of our American boys doing anything like that. Yet we think we are vastly superior to the Indians!”
“But his vision, after all, probably came because he was dizzy for lack of food, and it was a superstition that it could furnish him a ‘medicine’ to bring good luck,” Mr. Taylor said.