I needed nourishment, but the midsummer’s travel across the continent to search the hot prairies for overconfident parents who would entrust their children to strangers was a lean pasturage.  However, I dwelt on the hope of seeing my mother.  I tried to reason that a change was a rest.  Within a couple of days I started toward my mother’s home.

The intense heat and the sticky car smoke that followed my homeward trail did not noticeably restore my vitality.  Hour after hour I gazed upon the country which was receding rapidly from me.  I noticed the gradual expansion of the horizon as we emerged out of the forests into the plains.  The great high buildings, whose towers overlooked the dense woodlands, and whose gigantic clusters formed large cities, diminished, together with the groves, until only little log cabins lay snugly in the bosom of the vast prairie.  The cloud shadows which drifted about on the waving yellow of long-dried grasses thrilled me like the meeting of old friends.

At a small station, consisting of a single frame house with a rickety board walk around it, I alighted from the iron horse, just thirty miles from my mother and my brother Dawee.  A strong hot wind seemed determined to blow my hat off, and return me to olden days when I roamed bareheaded over the hills.  After the puffing engine of my train was gone, I stood on the platform in deep solitude.  In the distance I saw the gently rolling land leap up into bare hills.  At their bases a broad gray road was winding itself round about them until it came by the station.  Among these hills I rode in a light conveyance, with a trusty driver, whose unkempt flaxen hair hung shaggy about his ears and his leather neck of reddish tan.  From accident or decay he had lost one of his long front teeth.

Though I call him a paleface, his cheeks were of a brick red.  His moist blue eyes, blurred and bloodshot, twitched involuntarily.  For a long time he had driven through grass and snow from this solitary station to the Indian village.  His weather-stained clothes fitted badly his warped shoulders.  He was stooped, and his protruding chin, with its tuft of dry flax, nodded as monotonously as did the head of his faithful beast.

All the morning I looked about me, recognizing old familiar sky lines of rugged bluffs and round-topped hills.  By the roadside I caught glimpses of various plants whose sweet roots were delicacies among my people.  When I saw the first cone-shaped wigwam, I could not help uttering an exclamation which caused my driver a sudden jump out of his drowsy nodding.

At noon, as we drove through the eastern edge of the reservation, I grew very impatient and restless.  Constantly I wondered what my mother would say upon seeing her little daughter grown tall.  I had not written her the day of my arrival, thinking I would surprise her.  Crossing a ravine thicketed with low shrubs and plum bushes, we approached a large yellow acre of wild sunflowers.  Just beyond this nature’s garden we drew near to my mother’s cottage.  Close by the log cabin stood a little canvas-covered wigwam.  The driver stopped in front of the open door, and in a long moment my mother appeared at the threshold.