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.

My father’s dwelling was on the outer limits of the round-faced village.  With every heartthrob I grew more impatient to enter the wigwam.

While I turned the leaves of my Bible with nervous fingers, the medicine-man came forth from the dwelling and walked hurriedly away.  His head and face were closely covered with the loose robe which draped his entire figure.

He was tall and large.  His long strides I have never forgot.  They seemed to me then the uncanny gait of eternal death.  Quickly pocketing my Bible, I went into the tepee.

Upon a mat lay my father, with furrowed face and gray hair.  His eyes and cheeks were sunken far into his head.  His sallow skin lay thin upon his pinched nose and high cheekbones.  Stooping over him, I took his fevered hand.  “How, Ate?” I greeted him.  A light flashed from his listless eyes and his dried lips parted.  “My son!” he murmured, in a feeble voice.  Then again the wave of joy and recognition receded.  He closed his eyes, and his hand dropped from my open palm to the ground.

Looking about, I saw an old woman sitting with bowed head.  Shaking hands with her, I recognized my mother.  I sat down between my father and mother as I used to do, but I did not feel at home.  The place where my old grandmother used to sit was now unoccupied.  With my mother I bowed my head.  Alike our throats were choked and tears were streaming from our eyes; but far apart in spirit our ideas and faiths separated us.  My grief was for the soul unsaved; and I thought my mother wept to see a brave man’s body broken by sickness.