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Old Man was traveling round over the
prairie, when he saw a lot of prairie-dogs sitting in a
circle. They had built a fire, and were sitting around
it. Old Man went toward them, and when he got near them,
he began to cry, and said, "Let me, too, sit by that
fire." The prairie-dogs said: "All right, Old Man. Don't
cry. Come and sit by the fire." Old Man sat down, and
saw that the prairie-dogs were playing a game. They
would put one of their number in the fire and cover him
up with the hot ashes; and then, after he had been there
a little while, he would say sk, sk, and they would push
the ashes off him, and pull him out.
Old Man said, "Teach me how to do
that"; and they told him what to do, and put him in the
fire, and covered him up with the ashes, and after a
little while he said sk, sk, like a prairie-dog, and
they pulled him out again. Then he did it to the
prairie-dogs. At first he put them in one at a time, but
there were many of them, and pretty soon he got tired,
and said, "Come, I will put you all in at once." They
said, "Very well, Old Man," and all got in the ashes;
but just as Old Man was about to cover them up, one of
them, a female heavy with young, said, "Do not cover me
up; the heat may hurt my children, which are about to be
born." Old Man said: "Very well. If you do not want to
be covered up, you can sit over by the fire and watch
the rest." Then he covered up all the others.
At length the prairie-dogs said sk,
sk, but Old Man did not sweep the ashes off and pull
them out of the fire. He let them stay there and die.
The old she one ran off to a hole and, as she went down
in it, said sk, sk. Old Man chased her, but he got to
the hole too late to catch her. So he said: "Oh, well,
you can go. There will be more prairie-dogs by and by."
When the prairie-dogs were roasted,
Old Man cut a lot of red willow brush to lay them on,
and then sat down and began to eat. He ate until he was
full, and then felt sleepy. He said to his nose: "I am
going to sleep now. Watch for me and wake me up in case
anything comes near." Then Old Man slept. Pretty soon
his nose snored, and he woke up and said, "What is it?"
The nose said, "A raven is flying over there." Old Man
said, "That is nothing," and went to sleep again. Soon
his nose snored again. Old Man said, "What is it now?"
The nose said, "There is a coyote over there, coming
this way." Old Man said, "A coyote is nothing," and
again went to sleep. Presently his nose snored again,
but Old Man did not wake up. Again it snored, and called
out, "Wake up, a bob-cat is coming." Old Man paid no
attention. He slept on.
The bob-cat crept up to where the
fire was, and ate up all the roast prairie-dogs, and
then went off and lay down on a flat rock, and went to
sleep. All this time the nose kept trying to wake Old
Man up, and at last he awoke, and the nose said: "A
bob-cat is over there on that flat rock. He has eaten
all your food." Then Old Man called out loud, he was so
angry. He went softly over to where the bob-cat lay, and
seized it, before it could wake up to bite or scratch
him. The bob-cat cried out, "Hold on, let me speak a
word or two." But Old Man would not listen; he said, "I
will teach you to steal my food." He pulled off the
lynx's tail, pounded his head against the rock so as to
make his face flat, pulled him out long, so as to make
him small-bellied, and then threw him away into the
brush. As he went sneaking off, Old Man said, "There,
that is the way you bob-cats shall always be." That is
the reason the lynxes look so today.
Old Man went back to the fire, and
looked at the red willow sticks where his food had been,
and it made him mad at his nose. He said, "You fool, why
did you not wake me?" He took the willow sticks and
thrust them in the coals, and when they took fire, he
burned his nose. This pained him greatly, and he ran up
on a hill and held his nose to the wind, and called on
it to blow hard and cool him. A hard wind came, and it
blew him away down to Birch Creek. As he was flying
along, he caught at the weeds and brush to try to stop
himself, but nothing was strong enough to hold him. At
last he seized a birch tree. He held on to this, and it
did not give way. Although the wind whipped him about,
this way and that, and tumbled him up and down, the tree
held him. He kept calling to the wind to blow gently,
and finally it listened to him and went down.
So he said: "This is a beautiful
tree. It has kept me from being blown away and knocked
all to pieces. I will ornament it and it shall always be
like that." So he gashed it across with his stone knife,
as you see it today.
Blackfoot Mythology |
