When the tree flowered : $b An authentic tale of the old Sioux worldNeihardt, John G.
History
When the tree flowered : $b An authentic tale of the old Sioux world
Neihardt, John G.
Historical fiction; Oglala Indians -- Fiction
“The bear always got away and there never was an end to that story. I
think it is still getting longer somewhere. Anybody could tell about
another time the woman bear did something, and he could make it up if
he could not remember any. This story had to be told like something
very sad and without seeming to know it was funny. I would laugh so
hard to hear the story and see how sad and worried the story-tellers
looked, that I could hardly stay on my horse. Maybe at night the bear
story would begin again; and when they got it going it was hard to
stop.”
Eagle Voice chuckled awhile, evidently enjoying remembered fragments of
the bear yarn.
“Yes,” he continued at length, “High Horse and I would roll and hold
our bellies with laughing. High Horse was a Miniconjou boy as old as I
was. I knew him when we were small and I used to play over there being
Tashina’s horse, and he was a girl’s horse too. It was on this war
party that we began to be brother-friends. We were always together;
and we liked each other so much that we decided we had been twins over
in Twin Land and had got parted because we did not happen to find the
same mother over here. We had heard the old _ohunka_ story from our
grandmothers, and maybe we did not quite believe it; but we wanted to,
because the story made it more wonderful for us to be together.
“Twins are not like other people, and there is something _wakon_ about
them. They come from Twin Land where they have lived together always;
and when they come into this world looking for a mother, they ride
around on jack rabbits. Nobody can see them; but they ride around
anyway, looking and looking for a good and pretty young woman. Maybe
she is getting water from a spring or a creek and the twins have
followed her on their jack rabbits. They are hiding in the brush,
and when the good and pretty young woman leans over, they hurry and
get inside of her. If only one gets inside, then the other must find
himself another mother, and all their lives each will be hunting the
other one.
“So we had found each other, and we said we were never going to be
parted any more. If the story wasn’t so, why did everybody know it?
“Beyond the Powder we came to a great flat land where many antelope
were feeding. Some high buttes were there standing all alone, and when
High Horse and I climbed one of them, far off towards where you are
always looking [south] we could see the tops of Pa Sapa [the Black
Hills] low down in the sky like a black thundercloud just beginning to
come up.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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