The fire stick at a Kickapoo-Shawnee meeting attended near McCloud, Oklahoma, was elaborately carved with a crescent, a bird, a father peyote on a rosette, the word “Christ” and crossed sticks.[93] The Caddo say this fire stick is the “heart,” while the twelve interlacing sticks of the fire are the “ribs” and the two ash mounds the “lungs” of Jesus; in some Caddo moons two fireman put sticks on alternately.[94] The Wilson moon of the Quapaw and Delaware has three firemen who sit by the door to fan entrants. The Arapaho[95] leader chooses his hictänäⁿtcä or “fire chief” by silently pointing an eagle wing-feather at him, which the latter uses as a fan during the ceremony; the feather of the Ponca fireman is a symbol of authority. The ceremonial fire as a trait is Mexican, Southwestern, Southeastern and southern Plains (e.g., Caddo and Hasinai), but as involved in peyotism it is a Mexican-Southwestern borrowing rather than Southeastern.[96] _Ashes._ An interesting feature, remotely suggesting the Southwest, is the building up of the ashes of the peyote fire into a figure. The commonest form is a crescent, smaller than and parallel to the crescent of the earthen moon, which is nearly universal in the Plains. At an early date the Comanche began making the ashes into the shape of a “sun eagle” and the Kiowa into a “humming-bird.” The Shawnee and Kickapoo call it a “water bird”; one Shawnee leader occasionally makes buffalo heads. A Pawnee leader, Good Sun, makes an “eagle” in the ashes. Jonathan Koshiway (Oto) says the bird is “the holy spirit when Jesus was baptized; it’s got good eyes like an eagle—you can’t fool it.”[97] The separation of the ashes into two piles in the Big Moon rite comes in for similarly varying interpretations. A Delaware informant said that on one’s journey in life toward the peyote “if you’re the right kind of fellow you can pass the fire and everything opens up” like the Red Sea. Some say the two ash piles are the lungs of Jesus; others that one is the grave of John Wilson and the other the grave of Jesus Christ. Some Osage say the whole interior of the altar represents a grave.