Racially mixed people -- Fiction; Western stories; Wyoming -- Fiction
But Singing Stream knew the story of “Sharper,” or “Bladder,” as he is
called by some of the people, because he is round and his grotesquely
fat figure resembles a bladder blown to bursting. Bladder’s province it
is to make a fool of himself, diving into water after plums he sees
reflected there from the branches of the trees. He dives again and
again in his pursuit of folly, even tying stones to his wrists and
ankles to keep himself down while he gathers the reflected fruit. After
his rescue, which he fights against valiantly, as he lies gasping on
the bank of the stream, he sees the fruit on the branches above his
head. It is this same Bladder who is one of the _dramatis personæ_ in
the moon myth, and that is told to women as safely without the limits
of that little learning that is a dangerous thing. Bladder met Rabbit
hunting; and Bladder kept throwing his eye up into the tree-tops to
look for game. The Rabbit watched him enviously, thinking what a saving
of effort it would be if he could do the same thing. Wherefore Bladder
promised to instruct him, telling him to change eyes after using one
four times, but Rabbit did not think that the first time counted, as
that was but a trial. So he lost his eye after throwing it up the fifth
time. And the eye of the rabbit is the moon, and the face seen in the
full moon is the reflection of the rabbit seen in his own eye as we see
ourselves reflected in the eye of a friend if we look closely. The
little girl was wonderfully impressed. She put her hand to her own
eyes, but they were in tight, too tight to throw up to the tree-tops.
Singing Stream also told little Judith that the Great Mystery had shown
truths, hid to man, to the trees, the streams, the hills; and the
clouds that shaped themselves, drifting hither and yon, were the Great
Mystery’s passing thoughts. But he had deprived all these things of
speech, as he did not trust them fully, and they could only speak to
man in dreams, or in some passing mood, when they could communicate to
him the feeling of one of the Great Spirits, and warn man of what was
about to befall him. Judith was not quite four when she took this
memorable drive with her mother, but the impression of these things
abided through all her years. It was to the measureless spaces of
desert loneliness that she learned to bring her sorrows in the days of
her arid youth, and to feel a kinship with all its moods and to hear in
the voice of its silence a never-failing consolation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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