THE COMING OF COLD MAKER
I well remember how warm and windless that March day was. There were
patches of snow on the north side of the hills, and in the coulees, but
otherwise the brown plains were bare and dry. The mountains, of course,
were impassable, so we kept along the foot of them, traveling east, and
that night camped at the foot of the Black Butte. The following morning
we swung around the butte and headed south by a little east, a course
that would take us to the junction of Elk River and the Bighorn, my
companions said. We crossed the Musselshell River at noon or a little
earlier, and that night slept upon the open plain. The weather continued
fine. The next morning also broke clear and warm and cloudless. We
started on at sunrise and, topping a ridge, Mad Plume pointed to some
dark breaks away off to the south, and told me that they marked the
course of Elk River. I estimated that we were about twenty miles from
them.
At about ten o'clock we marked a big wedge of gray geese coming north,
and Red Crow, pointing to them, exclaimed: "See the sun's messengers! He
sends them north to tell us that he is coming to drive Cold Maker back
to his always-winter land!"
He had no more than said that than the geese suddenly broke their
well-ordered wedge lines and, shrilly honking, turned and went straight
south on wild, uneven wings!
"Ha! They have seen Cold Maker coming! Yes! He is coming; I can smell
him!" Mad Plume exclaimed, and brought his horse to a stand and looked
to the north.
So did we, and saw a black belt of fog all across the horizon and right
down upon the ground, and coming south with frightful speed. It had
advanced as far as the north slope of the Snowy Mountains when we turned
and saw it, and even as we looked they were lost in its blackness! The
air suddenly became strong with the odor of burning grass. I had never
seen anything like it. The swiftly moving, black fog bank, apparently
turning over and over like a huge roller and blotting out the plain and
mountains, frightened me, and I asked my companions what it meant.
"Fearful wind, cold, and snow! Cold Maker is bringing it! He hides
himself in his black breath!" Red Crow told me.
"We have to ride hard! Unless we can get to the timber we are gone!" Mad
Plume cried, and away we went as though we were trying to outride a big
war party. And then suddenly that black fog bank struck us and instead
of fog it was a terrific storm cloud! The wind all but tore us from our
horses; fine, hard snow swirled and beat into our eyes, almost blinding
us, and the air became bitterly cold. I marveled at the sudden change
from sunny spring to a winter blizzard. Like my companions, I had on a
pair of soft leather moccasins, and over them a pair of buffalo robe
moccasins, and on my hands were robe mittens, but for all their
thickness and warmth both hands and feet began to numb in the terrible
cold of the storm.
Mad Plume led us, we following close in single file. In front of me, not
ten feet away, Red Crow and his horse were but dim shadows in the
driving snow. I saw him dismount and begin running beside his horse, and
I got down and did likewise. And so, alternately on foot and riding we
went on and on until it seemed to me that we had traveled thrice the
distance to the river breaks that we had seen so plainly before the
storm came up. At last Mad Plume stopped and we crowded around him. He
had to shout to make himself heard. "What think you?" he asked. "Is the
wind still from the north?"
We could not answer that. To me it seemed to be coming from all
directions at once.
"If Cold Maker has changed it we are sure to become lost and die. If he
still blows it south we should soon get to shelter," he said, and led
on.
"We are lost!" I kept saying to myself as we ran, and rode, on and on
for what seemed to me hours and hours, the snow at last becoming so deep
that we were obliged to remain on our horses. But just as I felt that I
was beginning to freeze, that there was no longer any use in trying to
keep going, we began to descend a steep slope, and at the foot of it
rode into a grove of big cottonwoods and out of the terrible wind! Mad
Plume led us into a deep part of the woods where grew great clumps of
tall willows, and we dismounted. "Ha! We survive! And now for comfort: a
lodge, fire, food! Hobble your horses and get to work!" he cried.
I couldn't hobble mine, my hands were so numb that I could do nothing
with them; so I ran around swinging them and clapping them together
until they became warm. I then cared for my horse, and with good will
helped my companions gather material, dry poles, dead branches, brush,
and armfuls of tall rye grass for a small lodge. We soon had it up
and a good fire going. The cold air rushed in through a thousand
little spaces between the poles; we made a lodge lining of our
pishimores--pieces of buffalo robe that we used for saddle blankets--and
sat back on our rye grass couches and were truly comfortable, and very
thankful that Cold Maker had not overcome us! Presently one of our
horses nickered, and Red Crow went out to learn the cause of it. "A big
herd of elk has come in!" he called to us, and we all ran out and
followed him on their trail; they had passed within fifty yards of the
lodge. We soon saw them standing in a thick patch of willows, heads
down, and bodies all humped up with the cold. They paid no attention to
our approach and we moved right up close to them and shot down four with
bows and arrows. We skinned them all, taking the hides for more lodge
covering, and cut a lot of meat from a fat, dry cow that I had killed,
and then we were prepared to weather the storm, no matter how long it
should last.
The terrible wind and snow lasted all that night and far into the
afternoon of the following day, and when it ceased the weather remained
piercingly cold. When the sun came out I took up my gun and went for a
walk, and going through the timber looked out upon a great river, the
Sieur de la Vérendrie's _La Roche Jaune_, (the Yellowstone). He had seen
it, where it merged with the Missouri, in 1744, and upon his return to
Montreal told of the mighty flow of its waters from the snows of the
Shining Mountains. How many times I had heard my grandfather and others
speak of it, and even talk of an expedition to explore its vast
solitudes to its source. They were sure that they would be well rewarded
with furs. The very name of the river suggested riches; rich mines of
gold and silver! And here I was, actually upon the shore of this great
river of the West, looking out upon its frozen stretches, and in quest
of neither furs nor gold, but of peace between two warring tribes! I
said to myself that the Sieur de la Vérendrie and his men, and Lewis and
Clark and their men had seen the mouth of the river, but that mine was
the honor of first seeing its upper reaches, and oh, how proud of that I
was! I did not learn until long afterward that upon their return journey
from the Western Ocean, a part of the Lewis and Clark expedition had
struck across the plains to the river, and followed it down to the
Missouri.
I returned to the lodge to find my companions roasting our evening meal
of elk ribs, and was soon eating my large share of the fat meat. When
that was over we made plans for continuing our journey. While I had been
out at the river, Mad Plume had climbed to the rim of the plain for a
look at the country, and found that we were not far above the mouth of
the Bighorn.
Said Mad Plume now: "No matter how cold it is in the morning, we must
start on. The colder it is the safer we will be, for we will not likely
be discovered by the Crow hunters, and that is what I most fear,
discovery of us while traveling, and sudden attack upon us. I think
that if we can reach the edge of the camp without being seen, we can go
on through it to the chief's lodge safely enough; the people will be so
curious to know why we have come that they will not then fall upon us."
"We can travel nights and escape being seen," said Ancient Otter.
"But we can't cover up our tracks; this fall of snow will last for some
days. Well, we will make an early start, and anyhow keep traveling in
the daytime if we find it possible," Mad Plume decided, and started to
talk about other matters.
After a time Ancient Otter said: "Our camping here reminds me of the
time that we made peace with the Crows just below, at the mouth of the
Bighorn, and the young Crow, Little Wolf, with whom I became very
friendly. I wonder if he is still living? I did not see him when we had
that fight, some moons back. If he is still alive I know that he will be
with us for making peace. I must tell you about him:
"On the evening of the day that we made peace, he invited me to dance
with him and his friends, and I had a pleasant time. A day or two after
that I asked him to one of our dances. Then we visited often in his
lodge and in mine, and we became close friends. One day he said to me,
in signs, of course, the Crows are fine sign talkers, 'We are five young
men going south on a raid; you get together four of your friends and
join us.'
"Two or three days after that we started, five Crows and five of us,
Little Wolf and I joint leaders of the party. We went on foot, traveling
at night, taking our time; we had the whole summer before us. We
followed up the Bighorn almost to its head, then crossed a wide, high
ridge and struck a stream heading in several mountain canyons, and
running east into the great plain. At the mouth of one of the canyons we
discovered a big camp of the enemy. We came upon it unexpectedly, soon
after daylight, and after crossing a wide, level stretch of plain.
Looking down from the edge of the cliff we had come to, there was the
camp right under us. People were already up and moving about, some of
the men preparing to ride out to hunt. We dared not attempt to go back
across the plain; there was but one thing for us to do; we wriggled down
into a patch of cherry brush just below the top of the cliff and in a
coulee that broke it, and felt safe enough except for the fact that the
brush was heavy with ripe fruit; some women and children might come up
to gather it.
"The cliff was broken down in many places, more a steep slope of
boulders than a cliff, and it was not high. From where we sat in the
brush the nearest lodges of the camp were no more than long bow shot
from us. We could see the people plainly and hear them talking. They
were the Spotted Horses People.[1]
[1] Kish-tsi-pim-i-tup-i. Spotted Horses People. The Cheyennes.
"The lodge nearest us was very large, new, and evidently the lodge of a
medicine man, for it was painted with figures of two long snakes with
plumes on their heads. A number of women lived in it; they kept coming
out and going back, but their man never once appeared.
"The horses of the camp were grazing in the valley of the stream both
above and below it and we looked at them with longing, for we could see
that many of them were of the spotted breed. After a time a boy on a
big, dancing, spotted stallion drove a large band of horses up in front
of the snake medicine lodge and then the medicine man came out to look
at them. He was a very tall and heavily built man. He wore a cow leather
wrap, medicine painted. My Crow friend nudged me, pointed to the big
stallion and then signed to me: 'I shall take that horse to-night, and
others with him!'
"I laughed, and signed back, 'You don't know that for sure. I may be the
one to seize him!'
"The medicine man was talking to the boy on the stallion, louder and
louder until his voice became like the roar of a wounded bear in our
ears. He suddenly reached up and seized the boy by the arm, dragged him
from the stallion, and then picking up a big stick began to beat him
with it. We groaned at the awful sight; almost we cried out at it, we
who never strike our sons. The women had come out of the lodge; they
were crying, no doubt begging the man to let the boy go, but he paid no
attention to them, nor to the crowd of people hurrying toward him from
all parts of the camp. He beat and beat the boy, at last struck him on
the head and he fell as though dead; and at that the women ran forward
and lifted him and hurried him into a near-by lodge. The man watched
them go, then took up his fallen wrap and went into his lodge. Said my
Crow friend to me, in signs, 'We must make that man pay big for beating
the boy. He shall lose his horses, all of them, and his medicine, too!'
"'Yes! Let us, you and I, take all his horses, and our men take others
as they will. But his medicine, no, not that; it would bring us bad
luck,' I answered.
"All that long, hot day, thirsty, hungry, we sat there in the patch of
cliff brush watching the enemy camp and its horse herds. We saw nothing
more of the beaten boy, and the medicine man did not appear again until
nearly sunset. He then went down the valley to his herd, which had been
allowed to graze back to its feeding ground, and caught out of it the
stallion, rode it home and picketed it close to his lodge. Other men
brought in one or two of their horses for early morning use. The sun
set. The moon came up. We climbed back to the top of the cliff, went
along it for some distance, and then down into the valley below the camp
to water. There, where we struck the river, was to be our meeting place.
After a long wait we scattered out, Little Wolf and I going together
after the medicine man's herd. We had kept constant watch on it, and now
went straight to it and drove it to the meeting place. Some of our
companions were already there with their takings. We left the herd for
them to hold, and struck out for the camp to get the big stallion. On
the way up my friend again told me that he would take the medicine. I
tried to get him to leave it alone, but his mind was set; the loss of
the medicine, he said, should be the man's punishment for beating the
boy.
"The lodge fires had all died out and the people were asleep when we
arrived at the edge of the camp. We kept close to the foot of the cliff
and approached the medicine man's lodge. The stallion was picketed
between it and the cliff. Little Wolf signed to me to go to it and wait
for him while he took the medicine, which we could see was still hanging
on a tripod just back of the lodge. Again I signed him not to take it. I
laid hold of his arm and tried to lead him with me toward the horse, but
he signed that he _would_ have the medicine and I let him go, and went
on toward the horse.
"I don't know why I changed my course and followed my friend; something
urged me to do so. I was about twenty steps behind him as he went up to
the tripod and started to lift the medicine sacks from it. As he did so
I saw the lodge skin suddenly raised and the medicine man sprang out
from under it and seized him from behind. I ran to them as they
struggled and struck the big man on the head with my gun and down he
went and lay still. He had never seen me, and never knew what hit him.
Neither had he made any outcry. As soon as he fell we ran to the
stallion, bridled him with his picket rope and sprang upon his back,
Little Wolf behind me, and still hanging to the medicine sacks. It was
my intention to make the stallion carry us out from the camp as fast as
he could go, but there was nowhere any outcry--any one in sight, so I
let him go at a walk until we were some distance down the valley, and
then hurried him the rest of the way to the meeting place. Our
companions were all there with their takings, mounted and waiting for
us. Little Wolf got down and caught a horse and away we went for the
north, and it was a big band of horses that we drove ahead of us.
"At daybreak we stopped to change to fresh horses, and as I turned loose
the stallion I signed to Little Wolf: 'There! Take your horse!'
"'I shall never put a rope on him! You saved my life; that enemy would
have killed me but for you. The horse is yours,' he signed back, and
went away off our trail and hung the medicine sacks in the brush where
any pursuers we might have would never see them. He gave them to the
sun.
"Well, when we got back to the mouth of the Bighorn we found that the
Pi-kun-i had started for the Snow Mountains several days before, so
after one night in the Crow camp we five took up their trail. I spent
that last night in Little Wolf's lodge, and we planned to meet often
again, and to go on more raids together. His last words, or signs,
rather, to me were: 'Do not forget that no matter what others may do,
you and I shall always be friends!'
"'Yes! Friends always,' I answered, and rode away. I have never seen him
since that time."
So ended Ancient Otter's story. It heartened me. If his friend was still
alive--and he certainly had not been killed in the big fight--he would
be with us for making peace, as well as Mad Plume's sister. Said Mad
Plume to me: "You now know why Ancient Otter is with us. He told the
story to you; we knew it!"
The next morning broke very cold; the air was full of fine frost flakes;
the snow was drifted and in places very deep. We unhobbled our horses,
saddled them and struck off through the timber toward the mouth of the
Bighorn soon after sunrise. An hour or so later we crossed the river on
the ice, and turned up the valley of the Bighorn. Here I again said to
myself that I was traversing country that people of my race had never
seen, but I was mistaken. I learned years afterward that a Lewis and
Clark man, named Cotter, had come west again in 1807, and had trapped
on the headwaters of the Bighorn, and followed it down to its junction
with the Yellowstone.
We saw great numbers of the different kinds of game that morning, and
the sight that most impressed me was the trees full of grouse, or
prairie chickens, as the whites call them. We passed hundreds of
cottonwoods in which the birds were almost as plentiful as apples in an
apple tree. They sat motionless upon their perches, their feathers all
fluffed out, and paid not the slightest attention to us as we passed
under them.
"They are cold and unhappy now, but in the next moon they will be
dancing, and happy enough," Red Crow said to me. He saw that I thought
he was joking, and went on: "Yes, dancing! They gather in a circle on
the plain and the males dance and the females look on. Oh, they have
just as good times dancing as we do."
He was right. Many a time since then I have stopped and watched the
birds dance for a long time. It is a very interesting sight. After the
long years I have passed in the plains and mountains, studying the
habits of all wild creatures, I become impatient when I hear people
speak of them as dumb creatures. Dumb! Why, they have their racial
languages as well as we! If they hadn't, do you think, for instance,
that the grouse could have learned their peculiar dance? Or the beavers
how to build their wonderful dams and houses?
The snow was so deep that we made no more than fifteen miles that day.
We hobbled the tired horses long before sunset, and put up another war
lodge and made ourselves as comfortable as was possible. We had seen no
signs of the Crows during the day.
It was the next afternoon that we sighted them, or rather, one rider
turning down into the valley from the plain, and several miles ahead of
us. We happened at the time to be in the upper end of a long grove, and,
while we could see him plainly, we were sure that the trees screened us
from him, bare though they were.
"The sun is almost down, he rides as if he were in no hurry; I think
that the camp cannot be far away," said Ancient Otter.
"Ai! That is my thought," Mad Plume agreed, and led on, the rider having
passed from our sight around a bend in the valley. We crossed a strip of
open bottom, entered another grove which circled clear around the bend,
and presently, looking out from the upper end of it, saw the great camp.
It was pitched in a wide, open bottom about a mile from us and was in
two sections, or circles, one, of course, that of the River Crows, the
other the Mountain Crows. Looking out upon them, and the swarms of
people passing in all directions among the lodges, I shivered a bit. Not
until that moment had I been even doubtful of the success of our
mission. Now a great fear came over me. Many of those people I saw were
mourning for the loss of some dear one in the attack upon us some
months back. I doubted that they would ever give us time to state the
reason of our coming; they would kill us as soon as they saw that we
were the hated Pi-kun-i! And then, to add to my fear, Mad Plume turned
to Ancient Otter and asked: "Brother, which one, think you, is the camp
of the Mountain Crows?"
"I can't make out for sure, but I think it is the first one. We have to
make sure of that. If we enter the camp of the River Crows we shall find
no one there to help us; right there will be our end!"
"Your sister and Little Wolf are in the Mountain Crow camp?" I asked Mad
Plume.
"Yes!" he answered, very shortly, and continued staring thoughtfully at
the camps.
Said Ancient Otter: "Oh, if we could only be a little nearer to the
lodges, I could tell. Little Wolf's lodge is on the west side of the
camp circle, and right next it, the first one to the south, is a lodge
painted with two wolves. The Crow wolf medicine."
"Yes, I remember that lodge. It is five lodges north of my sister's
lodge," said Mad Plume.
"Well, one thing we can do! Unless we freeze to death!" Mad Plume went
on. "We can stay right here until night, then sneak into camp and find
my sister and your friend and get them to help us, to protect us until
we are in the chief's lodge."
We all agreed that that was the only thing to do, and began our chilly
wait. Red Crow pointed to the many bands of horses grazing between the
camp and us, and on both slopes of the valley. "What a chance for us if
we were raiders!" he exclaimed.
"Don't talk foolishness at this time!" Mad Plume told him. "It is best
that you pray the gods for help in what we are about to undertake!" And
with that he voiced a short, earnest prayer to the sun, to Old Man, and
his own medicine animal--"thou little under water animal"--he called it,
to preserve us from all the dangers that we were to face there in the
enemy camp. And when he had finished I cried out even as the others
did: "Ai! Spuhts-uh Mut-tup-i, kim-o-ket-an-nan!" (Yes! Above People,
pity have for us!)
Hai! Hai! But it was cold! Our horses stood humped up and miserable, the
sweat freezing on their hair.
"We have to hobble them and turn them loose to graze, else they will
freeze to death," said Mad Plume.
"Yes, we may as well do that. If all goes well with us we shall find
them safe enough hereabout, and if we never come back for them, why,
they will live anyhow!" said Ancient Otter. So we turned them out, and
set our saddles and ropes and pishimores in a little pile, and stamped
about and swung our arms trying to keep warm.
Oh, how slowly, and yet how fast the sun went down that evening. But
down it went at last, and as soon as the valley was really dark we
started for the camp. As we neared it Mad Plume's last words were:
"Remember this: You are to expect abuse and you are to stand it until
you see that there is no hope for us. Then, _die fighting_!"
Cheering words, weren't they!