Читать книгу Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park - James Willard Schultz - Страница 7

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We are a considerable camp of people: Yellow Wolf, my old uncle-in-law; Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill, another uncle-in-law; Big Spring; Two Guns; Black Bull; Stabs-by-Mistake; Eagle Child; Eli Guardipe, or Takes-Gun-Ahead. And with them they have their eleven women and fourteen children. All are my especial friends, and all the men have been to war—some of them many times—and have counted coup upon the enemy. Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill has many battle scars on different parts of his body. I was with him when he got the last one, in a fight with the Crees. The bullet struck him in the forehead, ripped open the scalp clear to the back of his head, but did not penetrate the skull. He dropped instantly when struck, and we at first thought that he was dead. It was some hours before he regained consciousness.

With all these men, and especially Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill and Guardipe, I hunted and traveled much in the old days. Naturally, we spend much of our time telling over this-and-that of our adventures. Meantime the children play around, as happy as Indian children ever are, and their mothers do the lodge work, which is light, and gather in groups to chat and joke. The boys have just been skipping stones on the smooth surface of the lake. The number of skips a stone makes before it finally sinks, denotes the number of wives the caster will have when he reaches manhood.

Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill and Two Guns are medicine men. The former has the Elk medicine pipe, the latter the Water medicine pipe, both ancient medicines in the tribe. They are spiritual, not material, medicines. In fact, they are the implements used in prayers to the sun and other gods, and each carries with it a ritual of its own. Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill has just told me that we will have some prayers with his pipe a few days from now. I shall be glad to take part in it all once more.