[12] The Sand Hills (Spät-si-kwo). The drear after-life abode of the Blackfeet. Their shadows there had a cold, cheerless imitation of life. "Ai! Ai! Let him come!" all cried, and I sent a messenger for him. During the ceremony he took six hundred feet of it, and so for all time to come is preserved the interesting ceremony of the Elk Medicine. The ceremony is always given in a closed lodge, but this time we threw the front of it wide open, so that the lens of that moving-picture machine could take it all in. As I have said, Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill is old, feeble, half-blind, and is himself unable to go through parts of the ceremony. So, on the evening before this came off, he sent for Chief Crow and his wife, living near, to help him out. Chief Crow is also a medicine man, his wife, of course, a medicine woman, and he owns the Seizer's medicine pipe. Four other medicine men were there, all of them taking part in the ceremony. In each of the three tribes of the Blackfeet there is a secret society of the medicine men, and the members help one another in their ceremonies, and they and they only can dance with the sacred symbols of their rites. When I went into the lodge the sacred medicines were hanging directly over the owner's couch, opposite the doorway. They were the sacred pipestem and many skins of water animals and birds enclosed in various wrappings, and a buffalo rawhide painted pouch containing sacks of various colored sacred paints. On Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill's left sat his medicine wife. I took my seat close to him on his right. Back of me, and all around the right side of the lodge from me, were a number of women. On the other side, opposite them, were the men and Chief Crow's medicine wife. The ceremony opened with a prayer by Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill, beseeching the gods to look with favor upon what was to be done. Then his wife arose and undid the fastenings of the medicines, and slowly, reverently, laid them on the couch between her and her husband. The opening song then began, the song of Po-no-kai´-ût-sĭn-in-ah (Elk-Tongue Chief). Oh, how I would like to inscribe that song here! Alice Fletcher says--and I know that she is right--that all Indian music is classical. But their tonal scale is far different from ours; we have not one musical instrument that can reproduce it. Never, never lived a white man who could sing these Blackfeet songs. As a boy, year after year, I tried to sing them, and always failed; one has to take them in with his mother's milk in order to sing them correctly. [Illustration: OPENING OF THE ELK MEDICINE PIPE CEREMONY Left to right: The author; Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill; his wife and the wife of Chief Crow, both medicine women; Chief Crow, medicine man, lifting the sacred roll of the medicine pipe; Medicine Weasel and Old Boy, singers]