The bob-cat crept up to where the fire was, and ate up all the roast prairie-dogs, and then went off and lay down on a flat rock, and went to sleep.  All this time the nose kept trying to wake Old Man up, and at last he awoke, and the nose said:  “A bob-cat is over there on that flat rock.  He has eaten all your food.”  Then Old Man called out loud, he was so angry.  He went softly over to where the bob-cat lay, and seized it, before it could wake up to bite or scratch him.  The bob-cat cried out, “Hold on, let me speak a word or two.”  But Old Man would not listen; he said, “I will teach you to steal my food.”  He pulled off the lynx’s tail, pounded his head against the rock so as to make his face flat, pulled him out long, so as to make him small-bellied, and then threw him away into the brush.  As he went sneaking off, Old Man said, “There, that is the way you bob-cats shall always be.”  That is the reason the lynxes look so today.

Old Man went back to the fire, and looked at the red willow sticks where his food had been, and it made him mad at his nose.  He said, “You fool, why did you not wake me?” He took the willow sticks and thrust them in the coals, and when they took fire, he burned his nose.  This pained him greatly, and he ran up on a hill and held his nose to the wind, and called on it to blow hard and cool him.  A hard wind came, and it blew him away down to Birch Creek.  As he was flying along, he caught at the weeds and brush to try to stop himself, but nothing was strong enough to hold him.  At last he seized a birch tree.  He held on to this, and it did not give way.  Although the wind whipped him about, this way and that, and tumbled him up and down, the tree held him.  He kept calling to the wind to blow gently, and finally it listened to him and went down.

So he said:  “This is a beautiful tree.  It has kept me from being blown away and knocked all to pieces.  I will ornament it and it shall always be like that.”  So he gashed it across with his stone knife, as you see it to-day.

THE STORY OF THE THREE TRIBES

THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

Fifty years ago the name Blackfoot was one of terrible meaning to the white traveller who passed across that desolate buffalo-trodden waste which lay to the north of the Yellowstone River and east of the Rocky Mountains.  This was the Blackfoot land, the undisputed home of a people which is said to have numbered in one of its tribes—­the Pi-k[)u]n’-i—­8000 lodges, or 40,000 persons.  Besides these, there were the Blackfeet and the Bloods, three tribes of one nation, speaking the same language, having the same customs, and holding the same religious faith.