In the busy autumn days my cousin Warca-Ziwin's mother came to our
wigwam to help my mother preserve foods for our winter use. I was very
fond of my aunt, because she was not so quiet as my mother. Though she
was older, she was more jovial and less reserved. She was slender and
remarkably erect. While my mother's hair was heavy and black, my aunt
had unusually thin locks.
Ever since I knew her she wore a string of large blue beads around her
neck,--beads that were precious because my uncle had given them to her
when she was a younger woman. She had a peculiar swing in her gait,
caused by a long stride rarely natural to so slight a figure. It was
during my aunt's visit with us that my mother forgot her accustomed
quietness, often laughing heartily at some of my aunt's witty remarks.
I loved my aunt threefold: for her hearty laughter, for the cheerfulness
she caused my mother, and most of all for the times she dried my tears
and held me in her lap, when my mother had reproved me.
Early in the cool mornings, just as the yellow rim of the sun rose above
the hills, we were up and eating our breakfast. We awoke so early that
we saw the sacred hour when a misty smoke hung over a pit surrounded by
an impassable sinking mire. This strange smoke appeared every morning,
both winter and summer; but most visibly in midwinter it rose
immediately above the marshy spot. By the time the full face of the sun
appeared above the eastern horizon, the smoke vanished. Even very old
men, who had known this country the longest, said that the smoke from
this pit had never failed a single day to rise heavenward.
As I frolicked about our dwelling I used to stop suddenly, and with a
fearful awe watch the smoking of the unknown fires. While the vapor was
visible I was afraid to go very far from our wigwam unless I went with
my mother.
From a field in the fertile river bottom my mother and aunt gathered an
abundant supply of corn. Near our tepee they spread a large canvas upon
the grass, and dried their sweet corn in it. I was left to watch the
corn, that nothing should disturb it. I played around it with dolls made
of ears of corn. I braided their soft fine silk for hair, and gave them
blankets as various as the scraps I found in my mother's workbag.
There was a little stranger with a black-and-yellow-striped coat that
used to come to the drying corn. It was a little ground squirrel, who
was so fearless of me that he came to one corner of the canvas and
carried away as much of the sweet corn as he could hold. I wanted very
much to catch him and rub his pretty fur back, but my mother said he
would be so frightened if I caught him that he would bite my fingers. So
I was as content as he to keep the corn between us. Every morning he
came for more corn. Some evenings I have seen him creeping about our
grounds; and when I gave a sudden whoop of recognition he ran quickly
out of sight.
When mother had dried all the corn she wished, then she sliced great
pumpkins into thin rings; and these she doubled and linked together
into long chains. She hung them on a pole that stretched between two
forked posts. The wind and sun soon thoroughly dried the chains of
pumpkin. Then she packed them away in a case of thick and stiff
buckskin.
In the sun and wind she also dried many wild fruits,--cherries, berries,
and plums. But chiefest among my early recollections of autumn is that
one of the corn drying and the ground squirrel.
I have few memories of winter days at this period of my life, though
many of the summer. There is one only which I can recall.
Some missionaries gave me a little bag of marbles. They were all sizes
and colors. Among them were some of colored glass. Walking with my
mother to the river, on a late winter day, we found great chunks of ice
piled all along the bank. The ice on the river was floating in huge
pieces. As I stood beside one large block, I noticed for the first time
the colors of the rainbow in the crystal ice. Immediately I thought of
my glass marbles at home. With my bare fingers I tried to pick out some
of the colors, for they seemed so near the surface. But my fingers
began to sting with the intense cold, and I had to bite them hard to
keep from crying.
From that day on, for many a moon, I believed that glass marbles had
river ice inside of them.