|
The Blood camp was on Old Man's
River, where Fort McLeod now stands. A party of seven
men started to war toward the Cypress Hills. Heavy
Collar was the leader. They went around the Cypress
Mountains, but found no enemies and started back toward
their camp. On their homeward way, Heavy Collar used to
take the lead. He would go out far ahead on the high
hills, and look over the country, acting as scout for
the party. At length they came to the south branch of
the Saskatchewan River, above Seven Persons' Creek. In
those days there were many war parties about, and this
party traveled concealed as much as possible in the
coulees and low places.
As they were following up the
river, they saw at a distance three old bulls lying down
close to a cut bank. Heavy Collar left his party, and
went out to kill one of these bulls, and when he had
come close to them, he shot one and killed it right
there. He cut it up, and, as he was hungry, he went down
into a ravine below him, to roast a piece of meat; for
he had left his party a long way behind, and night was
now coming on. As he was roasting the meat, he thought,
for he was very tired, "It is a pity I did not bring one
of my young men with me. He could go up on that hill and
get some hair from that bull's head, and I could wipe
out my gun." While he sat there thinking this, and
talking to himself, a bunch of this hair came over him
through the air, and fell on the ground right in front
of him. When this happened, it frightened him a little;
for he thought that perhaps some of his enemies were
close by, and had thrown the bunch of hair at him. After
a little while, he took the hair, and cleaned his gun
and loaded it, and then sat and watched for a time. He
was uneasy, and at length decided that he would go on
further up the river, to see what he could discover. He
went on, up the stream, until he came to the mouth of
the St. Mary's River. It was now very late in the night,
and he was very tired, so he crept into a large bunch of
rye-grass to hide and sleep for the night.
The summer before this, the
Blackfeet (Sik-si-kau) had been camped on this bottom,
and a woman had been killed in this same patch of
rye-grass where Heavy Collar had lain down to rest. He
did not know this, but still he seemed to be troubled
that night. He could not sleep. He could always hear
something, but what it was he could not make out. He
tried to go to sleep, but as soon as he dozed off he
kept thinking he heard something in the distance. He
spent the night there, and in the morning when it became
light, there he saw right beside him the skeleton of the
woman who had been killed the summer before.
That morning he went on, following
up the stream to Belly River. All day long as he was
traveling, he kept thinking about his having slept by
this woman's bones. It troubled him. He could not forget
it. At the same time he was very tired, because he had
walked so far and had slept so little. As night came on,
he crossed over to an island, and determined to camp for
the night. At the upper end of the island was a large
tree that had drifted down and lodged, and in a fork of
this tree he built his fire, and got in a crotch of one
of the forks, and sat with his back to the fire, warming
himself, but all the time he was thinking about the
woman he had slept beside the night before. As he sat
there, all at once he heard over beyond the tree, on the
other side of the fire, a sound as if something were
being dragged toward him along the ground. It sounded as
if a piece of a lodge were being dragged over the grass.
It came closer and closer.
Heavy Collar was scared. He was
afraid to turn his head and look back to see what it was
that was coming. He heard the noise come up to the tree
in which his fire was built, and then it stopped, and
all at once he heard some one whistling a tune. He
turned around and looked toward the sound, and there,
sitting on the other fork of the tree, right opposite to
him, was the pile of bones by which he had slept, only
now all together in the shape of a skeleton. This ghost
had on it a lodge covering. The string, which is tied to
the pole, was fastened about the ghost's neck; the wings
of the lodge stood out on either side of its head, and
behind it the lodge could be seen, stretched out and
fading away into the darkness. The ghost sat on the old
dead limb and whistled its tune, and as it whistled, it
swung its legs in time to the tune.
When Heavy Collar saw this, his
heart almost melted away. At length he mustered up
courage, and said: "Oh ghost, go away, and do not
trouble me. I am very tired; I want to rest." The ghost
paid no attention to him, but kept on whistling,
swinging its legs in time to the tune. Four times he
prayed to her, saying: "Oh ghost, take pity on me! Go
away and leave me alone. I am tired; I want to rest."
The more he prayed, the more the ghost whistled and
seemed pleased, swinging her legs, and turning her head
from side to side, sometimes looking down at him, and
sometimes up at the stars, and all the time whistling.
When he saw that she took no notice
of what he said, Heavy Collar got angry at heart, and
said, "Well, ghost, you do not listen to my prayers, and
I shall have to shoot you to drive you away." With that
he seized his gun, and throwing it to his shoulder, shot
right at the ghost. When he shot at her, she fell over
backward into the darkness, screaming out: "Oh Heavy
Collar, you have shot me, you have killed me! You dog,
Heavy Collar! there is no place on this earth where you
can go that I will not find you; no place where you can
hide that I will not come."
As she fell back and said this,
Heavy Collar sprang to his feet, and ran away as fast as
he could. She called after him: "I have been killed
once, and now you are trying to kill me again. Oh Heavy
Collar!" As he ran away, he could still hear her angry
words following him, until at last they died away in the
distance. He ran all night long, and whenever he stopped
to breathe and listen, he seemed to hear in the distance
the echoes of her voice. All he could hear was, "Oh
Heavy Collar!" and then he would rush away again. He ran
until he was all tired out, and by this time it was
daylight. He was now quite a long way below Fort McLeod.
He was very sleepy, but dared not lie down, for he
remembered that the ghost had said that she would follow
him. He kept walking on for some time, and then sat down
to rest, and at once fell asleep.
Before he had left his party, Heavy
Collar had said to his young men: "Now remember, if any
one of us should get separated from the party, let him
always travel to the Belly River Buttes. There will be
our meeting-place." When their leader did not return to
them, the party started across the country and went
toward the Belly River Buttes. Heavy Collar had followed
the river up, and had gone a long distance out of his
way; and when he awoke from his sleep he too started
straight for the Belly River Buttes, as he had said he
would.
When his party reached the Buttes,
one of them went up on top of the hill to watch. After a
time, as he looked down the river, he saw two persons
coming, and as they came nearer, he saw that one of them
was Heavy Collar, and by his side was a woman. The
watcher called up the rest of the party, and said to
them: "Here comes our chief. He has had luck. He is
bringing a woman with him. If he brings her into camp,
we will take her away from him." And they all laughed.
They supposed that he had captured her. They went down
to the camp, and sat about the fire, looking at the two
people coming, and laughing among themselves at the idea
of their chief bringing in a woman. When the two persons
had come close, they could see that Heavy Collar was
walking fast, and the woman would walk by his side a
little way, trying to keep up, and then would fall
behind, and then trot along to catch up to him again.
Just before the pair reached camp there was a deep
ravine that they had to cross. They went down into this
side by side, and then Heavy Collar came up out of it
alone, and came on into the camp.
When he got there, all the young
men began to laugh at him and to call out, "Heavy
Collar, where is your woman?" He looked at them for a
moment, and then said: "Why, I have no woman. I do not
understand what you are talking about." One of them
said: "Oh, he has hidden her in that ravine. He was
afraid to bring her into camp." Another said, "Where did
you capture her, and what tribe does she belong to?"
Heavy Collar looked from one to another, and said: "I
think you are all crazy. I have taken no woman. What do
you mean?" The young man said: "Why, that woman that you
had with you just now: where did you get her, and where
did you leave her? Is she down in the coulee? We all saw
her, and it is no use to deny that she was with you.
Come now, where is she?" When they said this, Heavy
Collar's heart grew very heavy, for he knew that it must
have been the ghost woman; and he told them the story.
Some of the young men could not believe this, and they
ran down to the ravine, where they had last seen the
woman. There they saw in the soft dirt the tracks made
by Heavy Collar, when he went down into the ravine, but
there were no other tracks near his, where they had seen
the woman walking. When they found that it was a ghost
that had come along with Heavy Collar, they resolved to
go back to their main camp. The party had been out so
long that their moccasins were all worn out, and some of
them were footsore, so that they could not travel fast,
but at last they came to the cut banks, and there found
their camp seven lodges.
That night, after they had reached
camp, they were inviting each other to feasts. It was
getting pretty late in the night, and the moon was
shining brightly, when one of the Bloods called out for
Heavy Collar to come and eat with him. Heavy Collar
shouted, "Yes, I will be there pretty soon." He got up
and went out of the lodge, and went a little way from
it, and sat down. While he was sitting there, a big bear
walked out of the brush close to him. Heavy Collar felt
around him for a stone to throw at the bear, so as to
scare it away, for he thought it had not seen him. As he
was feeling about, his hand came upon a piece of bone,
and he threw this over at the bear, and hit it. Then the
bear spoke, and said: "Well, well, well, Heavy Collar;
you have killed me once, and now here you are hitting
me. Where is there a place in this world where you can
hide from me? I will find you, I don't care where you
may go." When Heavy Collar heard this, he knew it was
the ghost woman, and he jumped up and ran toward his
lodge, calling out, "Run, run, a ghost bear is upon us!"
All the people in the camp ran to
his lodge, so that it was crowded full of people. There
was a big fire in the lodge, and the wind was blowing
hard from the west. Men, women, and children were
huddled together in the lodge, and were very much afraid
of the ghost. They could hear her walking toward the
lodge, grumbling, and saying: "I will kill all these
dogs. Not one of them shall get away." The sounds kept
coming closer and closer, until they were right at the
lodge door. Then she said, "I will smoke you to death."
And as she said this, she moved the poles, so that the
wings of the lodge turned toward the west, and the wind
could blow in freely through the smoke hole. All this
time she was threatening terrible things against them.
The lodge began to get full of smoke, and the children
were crying, and all were in great distress almost
suffocating. So they said, "Let us lift one man up here
inside, and let him try to fix the ears, so that the
lodge will get clear of smoke." They raised a man up,
and he was standing on the shoulders of the others, and,
blinded and half strangled by the smoke, was trying to
turn the wings. While he was doing this, the ghost
suddenly hit the lodge a blow, and said, "Un!" and this
scared the people who were holding the man, and they
jumped and let him go, and he fell down. Then the people
were in despair, and said, "It is no use; she is
resolved to smoke us to death." All the time the smoke
was getting thicker in the lodge.
Heavy Collar said: "Is it possible
that she can destroy us? Is there no one here who has
some strong dream power that can overcome this ghost?"
His mother said: "I will try to do
something. I am older than any of you, and I will see
what I can do." So she got down her medicine bundle and
painted herself, and got out a pipe and filled it and
lighted it, and stuck the stem out through the lodge
door, and sat there and began to pray to the ghost
woman. She said: "Oh ghost, take pity on us, and go
away. We have never wronged you, but you are troubling
us and frightening our children. Accept what I offer
you, and leave us alone."
A voice came from behind the lodge
and said: "No, no, no; you dogs, I will not listen to
you. Every one of you must die."
The old woman repeated her prayer:
"Ghost, take pity on us. Accept this smoke and go away."
Then the ghost said: "How can you
expect me to smoke, when I am way back here? Bring that
pipe out here. I have no long bill to reach round the
lodge." So the old woman went out of the lodge door, and
reached out the stem of the pipe as far as she could
reach around toward the back of the lodge. The ghost
said: "No, I do not wish to go around there to where you
have that pipe. If you want me to smoke it, you must
bring it here." The old woman went around the lodge
toward her, and the ghost woman began to back away, and
said, "No, I do not smoke that kind of a pipe." And when
the ghost started away, the old woman followed her, and
she could not help herself.
She called out, "Oh my children,
the ghost is carrying me off!" Heavy Collar rushed out,
and called to the others, "Come, and help me take my
mother from the ghost." He grasped his mother about the
waist and held her, and another man took him by the
waist, and another him, until they were all strung out,
one behind the other, and all following the old woman,
who was following the ghost woman, who was walking away.
All at once the old woman let go of
the pipe, and fell over dead. The ghost disappeared, and
they were troubled no more by the ghost woman.
Blackfoot Mythology |
