SPINNING TOP
Winter was now come, but the people were very comfortable in their
lodges in the Two Medicine Valley. After all, the winters are very mild
on the plains close under the Rocky Mountains in Montana. Sometimes a
blizzard swoops down from the north, bringing some snow and intense
cold, but it seldom lasts long. Within a few days a Chinook wind comes
out of the west, a wind that started from the Japan Current of the
Pacific Ocean, eight hundred miles away, and this is so warm that it
kills the blizzard and melts the snow. Sometimes, even in January, this
wind is so very warm that it makes the air feel as if summer had really
come. This is the way it usually is on the northern Montana plains in
winter. But about once in twenty years the north wind keeps the west
wind back for a couple of months or more. Then the snow falls deep, and
the thermometer stays away down below zero, and the animals and birds
die by the hundred. At such a time I have seen more than a hundred
antelope, a whole band, lying frozen to death on the plain.
This was a good winter; too good, the boys and girls thought, for they
wanted the river to freeze over so they could play on the ice. So it was
that one night when Sinopah was going to crawl into his warm
buffalo-robe couch, he made a short prayer to Ai-sto-yim-sta,
Cold-Maker. He was the god who lived in the north, and who made raids
into the southland, hidden always in the swirling snow of the terrible
blizzards he made.
"Hai-yu, Ai-sto-yim-sta," little Sinopah piped shrilly, "have pity on
all of us children. Come quickly; come this night and make ice for us to
play on."
His mother heard him and cried out to White Wolf: "Now what do you
think this naughty boy is doing? He prays Cold-Maker to come and make
ice for him."
"Is it so!" his father exclaimed. "Sinopah, come here. I have something
to say. Now, listen!" he went on, when he had the boy close in his arms.
"Cold-Maker is a bad god, and you must never pray to him to come. He is
not like the Sun, the great giver of life; he is the giver of death.
Many and many a one of our people he has done to death. You pray him to
come and make ice. Well, away out there on the plains are many of our
hunters. They are coming slowly toward camp; very slowly because their
horses are carrying heavy loads of meat for the women and children, and
hides to be tanned into soft, warm robes. Now, suppose that Cold-Maker
does come; come now, this night? You will have the ice to play on, yes.
But other children will have no fathers: they will be lying dead out on
the plain."
"Oh, I didn't think of that," said Sinopah. "Cold-Maker is a bad god. I
will never pray again to him. But I would like to have some ice."
"The ice will come soon enough," said White Wolf. "Now, go you to your
robes and sleep."
It was not long after this that there would be heavy white frost on the
trees and the grass in the early morning, and thin ice along the edge of
the river in the still places. Little by little this ice thickened and
crept out from the shore, so that White Wolf had to break it when he
carried Sinopah with him for the daily bath. When the two of them
plunged into the cold water they shivered and cried, "Ah-ha-ha-ha-ah!"
and shrank from the feel of it; but oh, how good they felt, when back in
the warm lodge. And then one morning when they went to the river, they
found it frozen clear across, the ice so thick that White Wolf had to
get a heavy piece of drift and break a hole in it for a bathing-place.
"Oh, hurry! hurry!" Sinopah cried. "I want to get back to the lodge and
put on my clothes, and come out here to play."
But his mother would not let him start out until he had eaten all of the
fat meat on a roasted buffalo rib. Then, taking up his top and the
whipper for it, away he ran to the river where nearly all the children
of the camp were playing on the ice, nearly all of them spinning tops.
Sinopah had a fine top that his grandfather made for him from the tip of
a buffalo bull horn. It was about three inches long, an inch or more in
diameter, flat on the upper end, and dull-pointed. There was no string
for it, as the spinning was done with a whip. This was a slender stick
about two feet long, to an end of which were tied three or four fine
buckskin strings about a foot and a half in length. The top was started
spinning on the ice with the thumb and middle finger of the left hand,
and then lashed frequently with the whip to keep it spinning. A
favorite play was for three or four children to start their tops at the
same time, each one trying to make his top spin the longest.
As usual Lone Bull and the little girl Otaki, Sinopah's best friends,
were with him this morning and the three spun their tops together,
sometimes one and sometimes another of them winning the long-time game.
Sinopah won most of the games, though, and he began to think that he
could spin tops as well as any one of the great crowd of children there
on the ice. When he had won three games, one after another, from Lone
Bull and Otaki, he was sure that he was the best player of all, and said
so.
Crow Foot, a boy older by some years, heard the boast and cried out:
"You say that you are the best spinner here? Well, I say that I am the
best. Come on, and we will see whose words are true. We will start
spinning our tops at the same time, and the one of us who spins his
longest shall win the other's top."
"Don't you do it, Sinopah," said Lone Bull. "He is bigger than you; he
has spun tops two or three winters before we commenced; he will surely
win your top."
"Yes, and such a nice top it is, and his only an old wooden one," said
Otaki. "Don't play with him."
"Oh, I am not afraid; I can win," said Sinopah.
And in another moment the two boys were spinning their tops in the
centre of a big crowd of children. No one spoke or moved; the only sound
to be heard was the swish and slat of the whip-lashes, and the dull
buzzing of the tops on the ice.
After a long time Crow Foot made a mis-strike with his whip and the top
wobbled. "He loses," the children cried; but no, he made another quick
snatch at it and it righted up.
Then Sinopah's top spun into a small, rough place in the ice and began
to jump. "Oh, Sinopah! be careful; take courage," the crowd shouted at
him, and just then he made a hard stroke with the whip that knocked the
top over on its side and sent it rolling into the crowd. Crow Foot
snatched up his top, chased the other one and recovered it, and danced
around holding both up in the air, shouting: "I win the bull-horn top! I
win Sinopah's fine, black horn top."
Sinopah cried. Lone Bull and Otaki tried to comfort him, but he cried
all the harder and kept saying: "Oh, my top! It is gone. What will my
grandfather say? He worked so long to make it for me. Oh, I want my
grandfather; maybe he will get it back for me."
Grandfather was right there; he was never far away from the boy, always
watching to see that he came to no harm.
"Now, what is the trouble?" he asked; but Sinopah was crying so hard
that he could not answer, and so Lone Bull told him how Crow Foot had
won the top.
"Well, well. That is bad," said the old man, and he led Sinopah away up
the river, Lone Bull and Otaki going also.
"You mustn't cry. No matter what happens, you must not cry," Red Crane
began. "Women and girls may cry, but boys and men never."
"But, grandfather, my top! Crow Foot has it; he won it from me. Will you
get it back for me?" Sinopah whimpered.
"I will not," Red Crane answered. "This is going to be a lesson to you.
Remember this--you, too, Lone Bull: those who gamble are always poor.
Also, gamblers are not good men: they use up so much time playing games
that they seldom hunt, and their women and children have not enough meat
to eat. Neither are they of any account in war. If all our men gambled,
the enemy would soon kill us all off."
"But, grandfather, I have no top now," said Sinopah, doing his best not
to cry any more, "and see how clear and hard the ice is. I want to spin
a top on it."
"Well, if you are very good, and will promise never to gamble again, I
will begin making you another top to-morrow," said the old man. "Now,
you will all go with me after some red willow. I want the bark of it to
mix with my tobacco. There is a fine patch of it growing close to the
shore above here."
Never was there clearer ice than that on the river this morning. It was
as clear as a glass window pane. Everything in the water under it could
be seen plainly, the rocks, gravel, and sand of the bottom, and the
trout lying almost still in the deep places.
While they stood looking down at a very large trout, suddenly a long,
slender, dark brown animal with big, webbed hind feet, came swimming
down into the deep hole. The trout saw it and turned and swam like a
flash toward the branches of a sunken tree. The animal was a faster
swimmer; it went so fast after the trout that it was just a brown streak
in the water, and it caught the fish, and, holding it crosswise in its
mouth, started to swim back upstream.
"Ha! Am-on-is" (otter), "killer of fish," old Red Crane cried, and
stamped on the ice.
That frightened the otter; it let go of the bleeding and dying trout and
swam away downstream.
"O-kye-hai! You children down there," Red Crane shouted, "spread out and
stamp on the ice. Scare back an otter swimming toward you."
There must have been all of a hundred children in the top-spinning
crowd. The old man had to shout two or three times to make them
understand, and then they all spread out and stamped the ice with their
feet, and pounded it with their tops and whips, making altogether a
terrible noise.
Old Red Crane, in the mean time, had gone to the shore and picked up a
rock bigger than his head, and now he stood with it raised high above
his head watching for the otter to come back. This it soon did, the
children below having scared it, and now it swam close to the shore
where the bank went straight down, hoping to find an air-hole, or a
beaver-hole into which it could crawl, and then climb up into the
beaver's sleeping-place above the water, where there would be plenty of
air.
There was no hole of any kind, except an open place in some rapids quite
a long way above, and the otter had to breathe before it could get back
to that place. Its lungs were full of air, and it had to let it out and
draw it in again, or die. So when it was quite close under Red Crane, it
rose to the under surface of the ice and blew out the air against it, a
great long wide silvery bubble. But before it could breathe it in again,
Red Crane dashed the rock down right over it. _Crash_! went the brittle
ice, the jar scattering the big bubble into a hundred little bubbles,
and frightening the otter away at the same time. There it was without
air in its lungs, and no way to get any except at the hole at the
rapids, so far, far away. That place the poor animal tried to reach. It
swam slower and slower, Red Crane and the children following it. Very
soon it had to expand its lungs, and as there was no air, water instead
flowed in through its nose and filled them. That was the end. The animal
gave a few feeble kicks, then sank to the bottom of the river, and lay
still. It was dead. Dead from want of that little bubble of air it had
lost. Could it have kept that, letting it out against the ice, and then
drawing it in again, it could have traveled for miles, or until it came
to an open place where it could crawl out of the water.
Grandfather Red Crane was all excited now. "Who would have thought we
would get a medicine animal so easy as that?" he said. "It was just
lucky that it stopped to make its bubble in front of me. But it is a
good sign. Sinopah, we will save the skin for you. When you grow up we
will make a bow-and-arrow case of it for you, and I know that it will
bring you good luck in war."
And with that he sent the children to camp after an axe with which he
chopped a hole in the ice. Then he fished out the otter with a forked
pole. It was a big otter; all of four feet long from the nose to the tip
of its tail. The old man forgot all about the red willow, and dragging
the animal, and the children following, he went straight back to camp,
where he carefully took off its fine furred hide and stretched it to dry
in the right shape.