“Next day there were drying racks all over the village, and I can see the stripped red meat turning brown in the bright sunlight, and the brown turning black. And I can see the happy women sitting in little circles with their sharp knives, unwinding the chunks of meat in their laps. They are joking and laughing and holding up their strips of meat to see whose is thinnest and longest. And outside the village raw hides are pegged out everywhere, and the old women are scraping and beating them for the soft tanning that made them good to wear and to sleep in on the coldest night. “But I kept thinking and thinking about the calf I did not kill and of the way I got chased by the cow. If it had only been a bull I might have felt better. It helped a little to blame Whirlwind for running away; but then I would remember the big voice that called to me on the pointed hill when I offered my grandfather’s pipe, and I began to feel sure the voice was angry at me. “Some of us boys made a war-game of sneaking up to the racks at night and stealing meat without getting caught. It was like going on the war-path for enemy horses. We had war councils out in the brush before we went and kill-talks around the fire if we got back safe with the meat. That was fun; but I kept thinking and thinking about the angry voice, and I was not quite happy. I wanted to try for a calf again, but I was afraid to try because I kept hearing the great voice scolding me for stealing the pipe from my grandfather. “When my grandmother noticed how I was acting, she said: ‘I wonder what is the matter with our grandson. He looks queer and he does not say anything.’ Then my mother looked at me and said: I think he has been eating too much again. He is always eating.’” VII _Going on Vision Quest_ After putting a chunk of cottonwood in the sheet-iron stove, I sat waiting for the old man to emerge from a reverie that he seemed to be inducing with faint, dreamlike tones from his eagle-bone whistle. Finally, as he had given no indication of emerging, I broke the silence: “Are you sure now that the great voice was not scolding you?” He peered squintingly at me for a while, and said: “I am very old, and I have learned so many things that I do not know much any more. Maybe I was wiser before my ears were troubled with so many forked words. “In the old days, it was from the seven tepees and the seven council fires that our teaching came. It was older than the oldest grandfather could remember his grandfather telling him; and more and more grandfathers before that until it was old as hills, old as stars.