At last, one day, Old Man decided that he would make a woman and a child, and he modelled some clay in human shape, and after he had made these shapes and put them on the ground, he said to the clay, “You shall be people.”  He spread his robe over the clay figures and went away.  The next morning he went back to the place and lifted up the robe, and saw that the clay shapes had changed a little.  When he looked at them the next morning, they had changed still more; and when on the fourth day he went to the place and took off the covering, he said to the images, “Stand up and walk,” and they did so.  They walked down to the river with him who had made them, and he told them his name.

As they were standing there looking at the water as it flowed by, the woman asked Old Man, saying, “How is it; shall we live always?  Will there be no end to us?”

Old Man said, “I have not thought of that.  We must decide it.  I will take this buffalo chip and throw it in the river.  If it floats, people will become alive again four days after they have died; they will die for four days only.  But if it sinks, there will be an end to them.”  He threw the chip into the river, and it floated.

The woman turned and picked up a stone and said, “No, I will throw this stone in the river.  If it floats, we shall live always; if it sinks, people must die, so that their friends who are left alive may always remember them.”  The woman threw the stone in the water, and it sank.

“Well,” said Old Man, “you have chosen; there will be an end to them.”

Not many nights after that the woman’s child died, and she cried a great deal for it.  She said to Old Man, “Let us change this.  The law that you first made, let that be the law.”

He said, “Not so; what is made law must be law.  We will undo nothing that we have done.  The child is dead, but it cannot be changed.  People will have to die.”

These first people did not have hands like a person; they had hands like a bear with long claws.  They were poor and naked and did not know how to get a living.  Old Man showed them the roots and the berries, and showed them how to gather these, and told them how at certain times of the year they should peel the bark off some trees and eat it; that the little animals that live in the ground—­rats, squirrels, skunks, and beavers—­were good to eat.  He also taught them something about the roots that were good for medicine to cure sickness.

In those days there were buffalo, and these black animals were armed, for they had long horns.  Once, as the people were moving about, the buffalo saw them and rushed upon them and hooked them and killed them, and then ate them.  One day, as the creator was travelling about, he came upon some of his children that he had made lying there dead, torn to pieces and partly eaten by the buffalo.  When he saw this, he felt badly.  He said, “I have not made these people right.  I will change this; from now on the people shall eat the buffalo.”