‘Are you ill?’ asked he. And she answered: ‘Yes; I have pains all over my body.’ But she was not ill at all, only very unhappy at the death of the buffalo which had served her so well. Her husband felt anxious, and sent for the medicine man; but though she pretended to listen to him, she threw all his medicine out of the door directly he had gone away. With the first rays of light the whole village was awake, and the women set forth armed with baskets and the men with knives in order to cut up the buffalo. Only the girl remained in her hut; and after a while she too went to join them, groaning and weeping as she walked along. ‘What are you doing here?’ asked her husband when he saw her. ‘If you are ill you are better at home.’ ‘Oh! I could not stay alone in the village,’ said she. And her mother-in-law left off her work to come and scold her, and to tell her that she would kill herself if she did such foolish things. But the girl would not listen and sat down and looked on. When they had divided the buffalo’s flesh, and each woman had the family portion in her basket, the stranger wife got up and said: ‘Let me have the head.’ ‘You could never carry anything so heavy,’ answered the men, ‘and now you are ill besides.’ ‘You do not know how strong I am,’ answered she. And at last they gave it her. She did not walk to the village with the others, but lingered behind, and, instead of entering her hut, she slipped into the little shed where the pots for cooking and storing maize were kept. Then she laid down the buffalo’s head and sat beside it. Her husband came to seek her, and begged her to leave the shed and go to bed, as she must be tired out; but the girl would not stir, neither would she attend to the words of her mother-in-law. ‘I wish you would leave me alone!’ she answered crossly. ‘It is impossible to sleep if somebody is always coming in.’ And she turned her back on them, and would not even eat the food they had brought. So they went away, and the young man soon stretched himself out on his mat; but his wife’s odd conduct made him anxious, and he lay wake all night, listening. When all was still the girl made a fire and boiled some water in a pot. As soon as it was quite hot she shook in the medicine that she had brought from home, and then, taking the buffalo’s head, she made incisions with her little knife behind the ear, and close to the temple where the shot had struck him. Next she applied the horn to the spot and blew with all her force till, at length, the blood began to move. After that she spread some of the deer fat out of the calabash over the wound, which she held in the steam of the hot water. Last of all, she sang in a low voice a dirge over the Rover of the Plain.