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How Howkawanda And Friend-At-The-Back Found The Trail To The Buffalo Country
by
“But over all their trails snow lay, deepening daily, and great rivers of water that fell into the Trap in summer stood frozen stiff like ice vines climbing the Pyweack.
“The two travelers made them a hut in broad branches of a great fir, for the snow was more than man-deep already, and crusted over. They laid sticks on the five-branched whorl and cut away the boughs above them until they could stand. Here they nested, with the snow on the upper branches like thatch to keep them safe against the wind. They ran on the surface of the snow, which was packed firm in the bottom of the Trap, and caught birds and small game wintering in runways under the snow where the stiff brush arched and upheld it. When the wind, worn out with its struggles, would lie still in the bottom of the Trap, the two would race over the snow-crust whose whiteness cut the eye like a knife, working into every winding of the Canon for some clue to the Dead Man’s Journey.
NOTE:
THE COYOTE’S STORY
Tamal-Pyweack–Wall-of-Shining-Rocks–is an Indian name for the Rocky Mountains. Backbone-of-the-World is another.
The Country of the Dry Washes is between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas, toward the south. A dry wash is the bed of a river that runs only in the rainy season. As such rivers usually run very swiftly, they make great ragged gashes across a country.
There are several places in the Rockies called Wind Trap. The Crooked Horn might have been Pike’s Peak, as you can see by the pictures. The white men had to rediscover this trail for themselves, for the Indians seemed to have forgotten it, but the railroad that passes through the Rockies, near Pike’s Peak, follows the old trail of the Bighorn.
It is very likely that the Indian in America had the dog for his friend as soon as he had fire, if not before it. Most of the Indian stories of the origin of fire make the coyote the first discoverer and bringer of fire to man. The words that Howkawanda said before he killed the Bighorn were probably the same that every Indian hunter uses when he goes hunting big game: “O brother, we are about to kill you, we hope that you will understand and forgive us.” Unless they say something like that the spirit of the animal killed might do them some mischief.