he took the hair, and cleaned his gun and loaded it, and then sat and watched for a time.  He was uneasy, and at length decided that he would go on further up the river, to see what he could discover.  He went on, up the stream, until he came to the mouth of the St. Mary’s River.  It was now very late in the night, and he was very tired, so he crept into a large bunch of rye-grass to hide and sleep for the night.

The summer before this, the Blackfeet (Sik-si-kau) had been camped on this bottom, and a woman had been killed in this same patch of rye-grass where Heavy Collar had lain down to rest.  He did not know this, but still he seemed to be troubled that night.  He could not sleep.  He could always hear something, but what it was he could not make out.  He tried to go to sleep, but as soon as he dozed off he kept thinking he heard something in the distance.  He spent the night there, and in the morning when it became light, there he saw right beside him the skeleton of the woman who had been killed the summer before.

That morning he went on, following up the stream to Belly River.  All day long as he was travelling, he kept thinking about his having slept by this woman’s bones.  It troubled him.  He could not forget it.  At the same time he was very tired, because he had walked so far and had slept so little.  As night came on, he crossed over to an island, and determined to camp for the night.  At the upper end of the island was a large tree that had drifted down and lodged, and in a fork of this tree he built his fire, and got in a crotch of one of the forks, and sat with his back to the fire, warming himself, but all the time he was thinking about the woman he had slept beside the night before.  As he sat there, all at once he heard over beyond the tree, on the other side of the fire, a sound as if something were being dragged toward him along the ground.  It sounded as if a piece of a lodge were being dragged over the grass.  It came closer and closer.

Heavy Collar was scared.  He was afraid to turn his head and look back to see what it was that was coming.  He heard the noise come up to the tree in which his fire was built, and then it stopped, and all at once he heard some one whistling a tune.  He turned around and looked toward the sound, and there, sitting on the other fork of the tree, right opposite to him, was the pile of bones by which he had slept, only now all together in the shape of a skeleton.  This ghost had on it a lodge covering.  The string, which is tied to the pole, was fastened about the ghost’s neck; the wings of the lodge stood out on either side of its head, and behind it the lodge could be seen, stretched out and fading away into the darkness.  The ghost sat on the old dead limb and whistled its tune, and as it whistled, it swung its legs in time to the tune.