“Frank, I live here, I don’t live anywhere else. This is the only home I have,” said the boy sadly. “Do your father and mother ask you who you play with at the Mission?”
“N‑o, they never did, maybe they will sometime, I don’t know.”
“I think they will, that’s why I’m going to tell you who I am, then they will know,” said Brush, seriously. After a pause he went on, “My father and mother died when I was very small, but I remember my grandfather. He was a very old man. He used to go to your father’s house; maybe you have seen him, but I guess you can’t remember. He was one of the chiefs, Tae-son’ was his name. Once we went to Omaha to buy a lot of things, and coming home we camped just this side of the town; there he died. He was the last relative I had. Now I have no mother, no father, no sister, nothing—no home.” He uttered the last word slowly as though thinking. “That’s why the Big Seven—that man’s gone, you take the spyglass and look for him.”
“If you have no home, why don’t you go home with me?” I asked, looking through the spyglass. “I know my father and mother would like you the same as I do.”
“If I go home with you, I know I’ll have a good time, but I haven’t any home to ask you to. All the boys in the Big Seven do that way.”
“I don’t care what the Big Seven do, I want you to go home with me.”
Saturday came. At breakfast I was anxious to have prayers over, Brush was to go home with me, and we anticipated much pleasure for the day.
“Don’t eat much,” I whispered to him; “we’re going to eat again when we get home. My mother will give us something good, she always does.”
After breakfast Brush went to the barn and filled the stalls with hay for the horses, which was part of the work assigned him. Then he ran up to the superintendent to report, and as soon as he came down we were off.
On the hill we were joined by two white boys, children of one of the Government employees at the mill. “Hello! Going home?” asked one of them. “We’re going to the village. They say they’re going to have a horse race there today. We want to see it.”
Instead of taking the well-beaten path to the village, we all turned off into one that led directly to my father’s house, and that passed by the burial-place on the bluffs. The two white boys were ahead, and when they came to a freshly made mound surrounded by a neat fence they stopped, and peered between the palings. “Pemmican!” exclaimed one of them. When Brush and I came up, we too looked in and saw on the grave a wooden bowl of pemmican. It was tempting these white boys, for they had learned to like this peculiar food.
“Jack, give me a boost?” said one of them, and soon he was over the fence filling his pockets out of the bowl. Then he offered the remainder to the other boy.
Brush and I were amazed and horrified at this action. We went straight on, taking no notice of the offer made by the boys to give us some of the stolen food. “I bet one of those boys will die before the year is gone,” said Brush, turning and looking back at the irreverent little rascals, who were now tipping their heads backward and putting pinches of the meat into their mouths.
“I bet so too!” I added. “It was awful the way they did. Let’s go on fast; I don’t want to be with them.” And we sped down the hill on a brisk run.
At the door of the house my mother met us and led us into her room. We both began to tell her about the dreadful thing the white boys had done, and expressed the belief that before the year was out one or both of them would die.
We sat down on the floor, and mother placed between us a pretty wooden bowl filled with freshly made pemmican, smiling at our childish notion that food taken after the spirits had tasted it meant death within the year. As we were eating with relish the food placed before us, my mother said, “You do not understand why the bowl of pemmican was placed on the little grave, and I must tell you. The spirit of the person buried in that grave, or the spirit of any other person dead and buried, cannot eat food; but people love their dead relatives; they remember them and long for their presence at the family gathering: it is this desire that makes them go and put a share of the food on the grave of those who have become nothing, and not the belief that the dead can return and partake of food the same as the living.”
We listened with respectful attention as my mother explained to us this custom which arose from the tender longing that prompted the mourner to place on the little mound the food that might have been the share of the loved one who lay under the sod; but I am afraid we failed to grasp the meaning of her words, and clung to the commonplace idea entertained by less thoughtful persons.
In the afternoon there was a general movement throughout the village, men, singly and in groups, walked with stately tread toward the edge of the bluff back of my father’s house. Women, too, no less dignified, made their way in the same direction, followed by their grown-up daughters dressed in their gayest attire, their ornaments glinting in the sun. Little boys and girls chased each other hither and thither as they drifted that way, and soon there was a great gathering of people, all bent upon enjoying the excitement
