Old Man was travelling 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.
NEXT