“In the evenings of my boyhood days my father always told stories. I
remember that I used to go to sleep while he was telling stories. This is
one of the stories he used to tell: There goes a wolf on a journey. He
came upon three buffalo. The wolf said to the buffalo: ‘My brothers, make
me as one of you, and we will all live together.’ The buffalo told him:
‘Will you stand the life that we live?’ The wolf said ‘Yes,’ and they all
told him to go a distance off and lie down on his back. The buffalo was
going to make the wolf a buffalo, and he lay down on his back and sides
and rolled in the dust, and then he got up and shook himself and he then
made a plunge for the wolf and stuck his horns in him and threw him in the
air. Just as he got to the wolf, the wolf jumped aside, and the buffalo
said: ‘You made me make that hard run for nothing.’ The wolf said: ‘Try
again.’ The buffalo said: ‘This time you stand up and I will come at you.’
So the wolf stood a good ways off. Just as the buffalo reached the wolf,
the wolf turned into a buffalo, and they locked horns with each other. And
thus he became a strong buffalo. He roamed with the buffalo for a while.
The other buffalo went off a little way by themselves and grazed on the
grass while the wolf-buffalo took the first grass near where he stood.
While he was eating there another wolf came along, and he said to the
buffalo: ‘Make me a buffalo, and we will all be brothers together.’ This
wolf buffalo then told the wolf to stand just as he had stood before. This
wolf buffalo lay down on his back and rolled in the dust and went for the
wolf, and as he was going to strike him he turned back again into a wolf,
and the two wolves were there together fighting. The wolf buffalo said:
‘I was happy as a buffalo, and was living fat—why did you come around here
and make me into a wolf again?’ And he began to fight him. And thus the
story ends. And this is why the Indians are always fighting each other.”
[Chief Bear Ghost]