and it would not be good to go back with only a story. We cannot steal all the horses we have lost. If we steal any, the Crows will follow us, and we shall die. So it will be just as well to die in there among them, and in the morning when we have gotten ready, we will go in there. And Little Bear said, ‘I came to go wherever you go and to die wherever you die.’ And Sharp Nose said to the boy, ‘You are a brave man. Now we will get ready.’ “So he began making a medicine bundle, and that was the first time the boy knew why Sharp Nose wanted the bladder and the tallow. Maybe he was too bashful to ask, because he was only a boy and Sharp Nose was a great warrior. Of course, Sharp Nose had his pipe with him, also some tobacco mixed with red willow bark. He kept these in a sack made of red flannel that he got from a trader, and he would need that also. So he mixed some sacred tobacco and red willow bark with the buffalo tallow, which was sacred too, because in his vision quest he had seen a spirit buffalo. Then he placed this in the buffalo’s bladder, and around the bladder he tied the red flannel; and red, you know, is a sacred color. This is the way he made a medicine bundle, and all tribes know that it is a very sacred thing. But when he had done this, he was not yet ready, for he had to take off his clothes and paint his body with sacred red paint. This he made by mixing tallow with some red paint dust that he always had with him. Last of all he fastened one eagle feather in his hair, so that it would hang down over the back of his neck. “When he had done all this and was ready, the sun was high; and he said to Little Bear, ‘We will go into the village now. You will carry my clothes and gun and the bow and arrows, and you will follow after me.’ So they started. “When they had crossed the top of the ridge, they saw many horses grazing on the slope and in the valley, and some of these they knew for the horses that had been stolen from their people. When they were about halfway down to the village, a Crow, who was out looking for some ponies, came riding out of a gulch all at once, and when he saw the naked man all painted red and the boy following after, he yelled and rode back fast to the village. But Sharp Nose went on walking towards the village with the medicine bundle on his back and his pipe in front of him, and behind him came Little Bear with the clothes and the gun and the bow and arrows in a bundle.