II.


Nine winters' snows had buried deep that night when my old grandmother,
together with my father and mother, designed my future with the glow of
a camp fire upon it.

Yet I did not grow up the warrior, huntsman, and husband I was to have
been. At the mission school I learned it was wrong to kill. Nine winters
I hunted for the soft heart of Christ, and prayed for the huntsmen who
chased the buffalo on the plains.

In the autumn of the tenth year I was sent back to my tribe to preach
Christianity to them. With the white man's Bible in my hand, and the
white man's tender heart in my breast, I returned to my own people.

Wearing a foreigner's dress, I walked, a stranger, into my father's
village.

Asking my way, for I had not forgotten my native tongue, an old man led
me toward the tepee where my father lay. From my old companion I learned
that my father had been sick many moons. As we drew near the tepee, I
heard the chanting of a medicine-man within it. At once I wished to
enter in and drive from my home the sorcerer of the plains, but the old
warrior checked me. "Ho, wait outside until the medicine-man leaves your
father," he said. While talking he scanned me from head to feet. Then he
retraced his steps toward the heart of the camping-ground.