Sometimes a man who was lazy, and had planted no tobacco, would go secretly to the patch, and pull a number of plants belonging to some one else, and hide them for his own use.  Now, in these prayers that they offer, they do not ask for mercy for thieves.  A man who had thus taken what did not belong to him would have a lizard appear to him in a dream, and then he would fall sick and die.  The medicine men would know of all this, but they would not do anything.  They would just let him die.

This tobacco was given us by the one who made us.

The Blackfoot cosmology is imperfect and vague, and I have been able to obtain nothing like a complete account of it, for I have found no one who appeared to know the story of the beginning of all things.

Some of the Blackfeet now say that originally there was a great womb, in which were conceived the progenitors of all animals now on earth.  Among these was Old Man.  As the time for their birth drew near, the animals used to quarrel as to which should be the first to be born, and one day, in a fierce struggle about this, the womb burst, and Old Man jumped first to the ground.  For this reason, he named all the animals Nis-kum’-iks, Young Brothers; and they, because he was the first-born, called him Old Man.

There are several different accounts of the creation of the people by Old Man.  One is that he married a female dog, and that their progeny were the first people.  Others, and the ones most often told, have been given in the Old Man stories already related.

There is an account of the creation which is essentially an Algonquin myth, and is told by most of the tribes of this stock from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains, though the hero is variously named.  Here is the Blackfoot version of it:—­

In the beginning, all the land was covered with water, and Old Man and all the animals were floating around on a large raft.  One day Old Man told the beaver to dive and try to bring up a little mud.  The beaver went down, and was gone a long time, but could not reach the bottom.  Then the loon tried, and the otter, but the water was too deep for them.  At last the muskrat dived, and he was gone so long that they thought he had drowned, but he finally came up, almost dead, and when they pulled him on to the raft, they found, in one of his paws, a little mud.  With this, Old Man formed the world, and afterwards he made the people.

This myth, while often related by the Blackfoot tribe, is seldom heard among the Bloods or Piegans.  It is uncertain whether all three tribes used to know it, but have forgotten it, or whether it has been learned in comparatively modern times by the Blackfeet from the Crees, with whom they have always had more frequent intercourse and a closer connection than the other two tribes.

There is also another version of the origin of death.  When Old Man made the first people, he gave them very strong bodies, and for a long time no one was sick.  At last, a little child fell ill.  Each day it grew weaker and weaker, and at last it fainted.  Then the mother went to Old Man, and prayed him to do something for it.