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 travelling, 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.
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